Instability
by Beta Gyre
Summary: AU. Flynn's a storm chaser with a tragic past that he won't face and a penchant for taking advantage of people. Rapunzel's been watching the skies for years, longing to see the storms up close. Some events based on the movie "Twister."
1. Devastation

Disclaimer: I don't own _Tangled_. I don't own _Twister_. This is what, in Fair Use, we call a parody.

Please note the following about this story:

I reference weather terms here and there. Where I deem it necessary, there will be explanations, but not all of them will be explained. This isn't a school lesson, and the jargon is only there for authenticity and "local color."

I've made the deliberate choice to refer to the Fujita Scale rather than the Enhanced Fujita Scale. This is because the Enhanced scale is in use operationally only in the United States, and this allegedly occurs in Europe.

If anyone reading this thinks that the subject matter might bother them (e.g., they experienced a loss from a major tornado strike), please, don't read it. If you must, then you've been warned. I'm not going to censor it and I'm not going to apologize.

The fic is rated M for multiple reasons, to be safe. I'm _not_ holding back in the language department, and that is the primary reason for the rating, but there's also some violence, friskiness, and depictions of drunkenness. Note that I said "friskiness." I do not have out-and-out smut planned for this story.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note<strong>: This begins on a _really_ cheerful note (sarcasm). However, the story follows _Twister_ somewhat closely in the main events, and this is necessary.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 1: Devastation<strong>

* * *

><p>It was a dark and stormy night, and the wind did not sound like a typical gale whistling through the branches of trees. It did not sound like anything the Fitzherberts had ever heard before. It was unearthly. It roared as if it had a mind of its own and this little homestead had somehow angered it by its very existence. At least, that was how it seemed to the terrified but fascinated child who lived there.<p>

_"Get into the cellar!"_ screamed the mother as they ran across the field. A piece of metal flew across the grass, barely missing her. Another one flew directly at the little boy's head, but preternaturally, he seemed to sense it, and ducked. He reached a wooden trapdoor and tried to pull it upward, but it was too heavy.

The tornado was now very close. A gust of wind got into the small crack that the boy had managed to put between the door and the ground, lifting the entire trapdoor up—and away. The hinges shattered and the storm cellar door was sucked into the wind.

"Jump!" cried the father. He held his wife's hand. The entire family made to leap into the shelter. Little Eugene went first.

A lot of things happened at once. He found himself suddenly not falling straight down, but flying—airborne—and a thrill coursed through his body at the sensation. It was both fascinating and horrible. He knew that if he didn't find something fixed to grab onto—

Suddenly he saw something. Eugene grabbed a metal pipe that had been bolted into the wall of the shelter for a grip. Clinging to it for dear life, he looked back at the stairs. His parents were still outside, holding on to each other, his father's hand gripping a remnant of a hinge. Sick at the terrible sight, Eugene loosened one arm from his pipe to reach for his father's other hand.

_"No! Don't let go!"_ shouted the man. Agony was in his eyes and his wife's. _"Whatever you do, don't let go!"_

"You have to get inside!" Eugene cried.

There was so much pain in their eyes. _"I'm so sorry," _his mother said over the roar of the wind. _"We love you so much. Don't let go."_

He let out a cry. The hinge that they were clinging to snapped, and they were pulled into the maelstrom, vanishing from his sight into a black cloud of darkness.

He screamed and screamed. He could hardly hear his own screams over the roar. The soul-shaking roar. But he didn't let go.

* * *

><p>It seemed like hours before the noises stopped, but when it was finally quiet, Eugene noticed that he was still clinging to the pipe. He felt the normal downward pull of the Earth and realized that it was over. Starlight, wicked in its irony, shone through the exposed hole in the ground. Gingerly he stepped down and began to walk up the stairs that he had never walked down in the first place.<p>

A scene of total devastation met his eyes. His house was completely gone, with no trace that it had ever been there except for what looked like trash scattered everywhere. The big tree that he had not been allowed to climb was snapped off halfway and stripped bare of all bark. Sap oozed from it.

He looked out, a sinking feeling in his body. "Mom?" he called tentatively. Another step. He was on the ground now, out of the storm cellar. "Dad?"

He broke into a run. _"Mom! Dad!"_

There was no answer.

He ran and ran. The debris that had been their belongings was barely recognizable. There was nothing there larger than the size of a coin. _Nothing._ He called for his parents for what felt like hours before finally collapsing on the ground facedown. The size of the debris told the tale. No one could have survived this. His parents were dead. He began to cry, and it very rapidly turned into uninhibited sobbing.

He didn't know how long he lay there, sobbing into the grass and the fragments of his old possessions. When finally he could stand up, he heaved a deep breath, swallowed a hiccup, and happened to glance at the other tree, the one that he liked to climb. It too was stripped bare of all bark, and all the leaves and smaller branches were snapped off, but something was caught in one of the lower limbs. He went over to the tree and quickly realized what it was. His satchel dangled from the limb, somehow completely intact. He expertly climbed the tree—it was harder now that it was so sticky and smooth—and retrieved the brown leather bag. At least he still had something. Opening the button and lifting the flap, he saw with a shock that the satchel still held the book of adventure stories that had been his last birthday present from his parents.

* * *

><p>"Damn squatters, no record of who they were or anything else," complained an ugly, red-uniformed man as he shuffled papers around in the office.<p>

Another official grunted in response. "Yeah, probably living outside the law. Bet they weren't married either. Were they even inside Corona borders?"

"Hell no," said a third officer.

"Then why's _this_"—the first man gestured at Eugene—"_our_ problem?"

"He's just a kid," said the second man. "Ain't his fault. We can't leave a kid out there all by himself. Better off they're dead, actually. He might have a chance to be something, away from a family of criminal squatters livin' under the broomstick."

The little boy sat stock-still in a leather chair in the office, clutching his satchel possessively and watching this scene. How _dare_ these people speak of his parents like this.

He suddenly noticed that none of them were actually paying him any attention. They were too focused on their paperwork or their stupid conversation. They didn't even see him as a person, most likely. He was just a problem to be taken care of. Silently, sneakily, he took a ballpoint pen off the desk and put it in his satchel. They didn't even notice. He had something of theirs, and they didn't know it. Inwardly he exulted at the feat and what it signified to him.

The first man was still taking down notes. "If he's fourteen, we can apprentice him out."

"Ain't likely he's that old."

"Scrawny. He might be. How old are you, kid?"

"Eight," he said sullenly. It was true, after all.

"All right. Looks like you gotta go to the orphanage. What's your name?" His pen was poised over a form.

Eugene suddenly came to a resolution. He was not going to have his parents' real names dragged through the mud by these despicable men. They didn't know who he was or who his parents had been. There was no record of them, so he would keep his memories of them to himself. No one else was worthy of knowing them, least of all these people. He would take on a new identity. The book in his satchel swam to the front of his mind.

He glared at them. "My name is Flynn Rider."


	2. The Lab

**Chapter 2: The Lab**

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><p><em>Eighteen years later...<em>

Flynn wasn't a big fan of peace and calm. Instead, liked to keep the lab in a semi-permanent state of low-grade turmoil: "F0 mayhem," as he privately called it. Not devastating, catastrophic F5 mayhem that left ruin in its wake. He didn't want that. The idea of F5-equivalent _anything _bothered him on some deep level, though he would never admit it to anyone. He wanted just enough to disrupt people. He didn't like it when people were calm and peaceful, but that didn't have _anything_ to do with his own past, the turmoil in himself, or the need to exert control over something, certainly not.

When he was fourteen, he'd finally left that orphanage and become an apprentice to an elderly scientist who regarded storm chasing as a dangerous, irresponsible, unprofessional thing to do. Flynn knew he wanted to do it as soon as he learned about it, and the disapproval of his mentor was only an additional motivation. However, Flynn was good at assuming the persona that people wanted to see, so he went along with this attitude, knowing that if he impressed the distinguished researcher, his first real job would be a good one. It had paid off; he had landed a position in the premier research laboratory in the country, and they _did _chase storms.

The day he had first walked into the lab five years ago, he knew that he wanted it. He wanted to _own _the Corona Severe Storms Research Laboratory. There was just one problem: Wilhelm and Ingrid Koenig, the directors, were fairly young scientists with many years left before retirement. They weren't going anywhere of their own free will. So he decided to drive them completely mad without ever getting blamed for it—_and _endear himself to them so that he would be the natural, the only choice to lead the place once they finally retired to keep their remaining sanity.

The plan he'd formed was almost derailed when he learned that their daughter, the child they'd tried so hard to conceive, had been kidnapped as an infant without a trace when he was 8 years old. They had lost their daughter around the same time that he had lost his parents, but he at least knew what had happened to his family. They had no idea if their little girl was alive or dead. He felt terrible about doing this to people who'd suffered something like that. But then he realized that if it wasn't nice to do it to them, it wasn't nice to do it to anyone, and so it didn't matter. It wasn't personal, in any case. He'd have decided to do it to anyone.

And after five years, his progress was "so far, so good." The Koenigs made no secret of their opinion that he was an extremely gifted storm chaser with a natural instinct for the weather. He tried to get into situations that no one else was comfortable getting themselves into, not just for the thrill (though he acknowledged to himself that this was a part of it), but also because it would impress them that he was that dedicated.

He helped along the perception of being favored in the laboratory at large. One day, he'd had a routine meeting with them. Nothing particularly important. But a group of low-level secretaries and a couple of young apprentices—_lucky punks to get apprenticeships here, _Flynn thought with some envy—had clustered in the break room near their office, and he decided to make the most of the situation. They tended to look up to the senior chasers anyway, and his reputation for being _The_ Chaser was well-known by that time. He put on the biggest, smuggest grin he could muster and sauntered past them as if he owned the place. Once he was out of their sight, he put his ear to the wall to listen in.

"Do you think they've officially given him the promise?" one of the secretaries said.

"From that look, I'd say he's the next director for sure," said another.

_Mission accomplished,_ Flynn thought as he stalked off. This way, the expectation would be created without being overtly traced back to anything he'd said. And anyone who had a problem with it—he thought in particular of the Stabbingtons—wouldn't dare bring up the subject to the Koenigs if they were (allegedly) the ones who made the choice.

Yes, he was going to have the laboratory someday. What he was going to do with himself after he had it, he was not so sure, but he'd deal with that if—no, _when_—the time came.

* * *

><p>Another day, the Koenigs' secretary, Agnetha, was busy making photocopies of the daily atmospheric sounding. Every chaser had to have his or her own copy. It was a territory thing. There were some things that storm chasers held sacred, and you just did not poach somebody else's Skew-T.<p>

Flynn watched her lift up the top, put the master sounding down, close the lid, and set the number of copies. There was a box of rubber bands resting on the table next to the machine. Perfect. It had been at least a month since he'd pulled this particular mind game. As Agnetha went over to the other side of the room to gather up the maps and other charts that the chasers would need, he swiped the rubber band box and put it in his satchel.

She returned with an armload of maps, intending to roll the Skew-T, a hodograph chart, and a set of the morning's weather maps into bundles for each chaser and put a rubber band around the rolls. When she noticed that the rubber bands were gone, she frowned.

"I could have sworn that they were just there."

"That what was there?" Flynn asked unassumingly.

"The rubber bands!"

He frowned. "Are you sure?"

"I know I saw them right here just a second ago!" She gestured to the exact spot on the table where the box had been.

He put on a confused face and shook his head. "Are you OK, Agnetha? Because I've been in here the whole time, and I promise you there were no rubber bands on this table."

She blinked. "But…"

"Really. There weren't." His tone was utterly sincere.

She sighed and blinked again, shaking her head. "I think I'm going crazy."

"Maybe you need a day off," he suggested.

"Maybe I do." She sighed again. "Oh well. I guess there are some in the storage room."

As she left, he smirked. Another successful mindfuck, and another trophy for the collection of stolen knickknacks, loose change, and office supplies in his apartment. He was quite proud of its size. It was tangible proof that nobody and _nothing_ would ever get the better of Flynn Rider, master of his environment.

* * *

><p>It was a good day, Flynn thought. The mobile tornado measuring station he'd designed was now reality, and he was looking at it. A four-foot-tall wheeled canister with instruments affixed to the sides and top stood against the wall of the equipment room. It almost seemed to be proud of itself, he thought. Dubbed "Moore" for no particular reason—one of the senior chasers, Bignose, thought it looked like its name should be Moore—it had been his dream for the past four years.<p>

It was supposed to be placed in the path of an oncoming tornado. A button would activate spikes to anchor it into the ground and prevent it from being lifted by the funnel. Supposedly the anchors would withstand an F3 tornado strike. They were probably going to deploy it in a few days... if the forecasts panned out. A major tornado outbreak was currently expected, and the forecasts had been converging more and more on this idea as the day neared. Flynn had a great deal staked on a quick, successful deployment; if Moore successfully recorded data from inside a tornado, Flynn had no doubt that he, the originator of the idea, would be the next director of the lab.

It was a good day, in his opinion, for another reason: The Stabbingtons were leaving the lab today. The lab would certainly be better off without them. They were stupid bumblers who had _no _instinct for storms, but they were crude, large, and thuggish, so they often bullied some of the younger chasers into doing what they wanted, no matter how idiotic or pointless it was. They had come to the lab around the same time that he had, and they had all been stuck in the same group for two years. Since Flynn was not particularly burly himself, he had little choice but to go along with their stupidity—at least until he figured out that he could get them plastered, stow them in the trailer attached to the rattletrap truck he chased in at the time, and do whatever the hell he wanted. He took particular delight in core-punching, even when he knew how to avoid the core of a thunderstorm; the hail and wind would freak out a pair of intoxicated idiots locked up in a trailer with no view of the outside. The only downside to it was having to roll them out of their own vomit after a chase and clean it up.

Flynn hadn't had to deal with them much since he had been promoted to the senior chase team. _These _were some pretty good guys. Vladimir, Hook, Bignose, Attila, Ulf—Flynn was sure that most of these were nicknames, but that was all right. _He_ didn't go by his birth name. It didn't even exist in records. Legally, he _was _Flynn Rider. And, while their legal names were undoubtedly something other than their nicknames, he didn't really care what they were. He didn't need to know that kind of information, and knowing it would seem to signify an emotional connection to them that he did not want. If they wanted to be called Hook and Bignose, he was more than happy to oblige.

The Stabbingtons were angry with Flynn after he had been promoted and they hadn't. They seemed to regard it as a betrayal, but Flynn hadn't worried about them after he joined the burly, tough senior chase team. (Vladimir was big enough that even the Stabbingtons were intimidated by him.) Now they were leaving. He wondered whether the Koenigs had finally had enough of their idiocy and had sacked them. He also wondered _where_ they were off to. Maybe someone would be talking about it in the break room. He left the equipment room and sauntered in to the lounge.

The entire senior chase team was there, looking grim and angry. That was odd. Oh well, his presence surely would cheer them up. It usually did.

"The Extreme!" exclaimed Hook, clapping him on the back with his normal hand. He'd obtained a hook for his other hand, reputedly after being trapped in a tornado-collapsed building with his hand crushed and pinned under a piece of debris, and he heroically cut it off himself in order to rescue the family that lived there. At least, that was the story that he told. The team knew the truth: He had lost it to gangrene after a knife fight in a shady rural bar.

"Hey," Flynn said, sitting down on a chair and stretching out. "Any coffee here?"

"Light roast with hazelnut and vanilla," said Attila.

"What?" Flynn said, his face twisting. "Who's responsible for _that? _ What's the _point_ of drinking coffee if it's not real coffee, a.k.a. dark roast served black?"

Attila frowned. "You know, Rider, some people are coffee connoisseurs rather than junkies feeding an addiction," he growled.

"Yeah, whatever," Flynn said, smirking. He knew the sort of people Attila referred to. They typically wore stupid-looking outfits, listened to strange, obscure music that no one would ever listen to for its own merits, and discussed current events not because they actually cared about them, but merely as a form of pathetic one-upmanship. They hung out in coffeeshops and ordered the most expensive, poncy beverages on the menu. Things with mint, cream, latte, whatever all the ridiculous crap was that they put in it. He wondered what they were trying to prove. He sure wasn't impressed with their act and couldn't fathom why a tough guy like Attila who had _nothing _in common with such people would defend them.

_"They_ aren't epicurists, Rider. They're posers." Attila was glaring.

Flynn blinked. He hadn't said anything. Attila must have guessed whom he was thinking about from the rants he'd made in the past when they stopped for coffee during a chase.

"Right," he said quickly. This wasn't what he had come in here to discuss anyway. "Anyway, I was wondering if anyone knew why the village idiots were leaving."

"Edvard and Gudric, I assume you mean," Hook said. The smirk on Flynn's face confirmed it. "You might as well wipe that grin off your pretty face, because the bastards have gotten corporate sponsorship."

His jaw dropped open, and his eyes bugged out. _"What?"_ he sputtered. _"How?"_

"Beats the shit out of us."

"Who would sponsor those fools over everyone else?"

"Whatever sucker did it is going to regret it, no doubt. But damn are they going to gloat. Already got an interview lined up with the newspaper, supposedly."

Flynn groaned. He suddenly felt a headache coming on and decided that, whatever it may have been flavored with, the coffee at least had caffeine in it, and that would help. He went over to the coffeepot and stood there, about to pour himself a cup, when something occurred to him. His eyes gleamed.

_This whole team could use a pick-up,_ he thought, as he blocked the view with his back, silently took a bottle of whiskey out of his satchel, and poured several shots into the coffeepot. No one noticed. They were too angry and dejected.

_Of course,_ he thought smugly._ No one ever notices._

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note<strong>: There _is _a reason why the mobile instrument canister is named Moore. In 1999, a Doppler on Wheels (a mobile radar) measured winds of approximately 300 mph in a tornado that struck, among other places, the community of Moore, Oklahoma. This is currently the record-holder for wind speeds in a tornado.

Also, Flynn is right about coffee. Pure dark roast _all the way._ :)


	3. Crash and Burn

**Chapter 3: Crash and Burn**

* * *

><p>The Stabbingtons' interview with the <em>Corona Daily News <em>was the following day during lunch break. On their final day working at the CSSRL, they had made absolutely sure that everyone—especially a certain chaser who enjoyed getting them drunk and locking them in the back of a trailer while he core-punched thunderstorms—knew when and where it would be.

It had also leaked out that the sponsor was Crown Enterprises, a venture capitalist firm that invested in any number of "cutting-edge" technologies and ideas (and was known for making off like a bandit with profits while trying to get out of paying royalties to the original idea developers, which gave Flynn a sense of schadenfreude-to-come). But what the Stabbingtons could _possibly _have used to entice them, no one at the lab could understand.

The Koenigs and the senior chase team did not really desire to see or hear the interview, but a kind of twisted curiosity overcame their disgust for it all. When they broke for lunch, they all piled into Hook's hail-battered van, which he called the "Barn Burner," dashed through the drive-thru of a fast-food restaurant, and immediately headed for the town square, where the interview would take place. When they arrived, Gudric was jabbering at the reporter, who was taking down notes as quickly as he could.

"And so _we_—my brother Edvard and me—we _personally designed _this baby, and that's what got the attention of Crown Enterprises," he said proudly.

"The contract is contingent on it working," Edvard added. "We've got to deploy it and prove it works, and then the deal is done. But we have no doubt it'll work."

"What exactly is it?" the reporter asked.

"It's this new system of measuring the winds inside of tornadoes." A tall bulk was behind him, covered in a black cloth, and with a yank, Edvard pulled off the cloth to unveil what was underneath: A large silver cylinder with instruments protruding from it.

Flynn could not believe his eyes. A red miasma of rage seemed to swim over him. Completely forgetting that his bosses and a newspaper reporter were present, he stormed in the direction of the Stabbingtons, shoving aside the attempted restraints of Hook and Vlad.

_"YOU!"_ he shouted at the top of his lungs as he reached them.

Edvard snorted. "Well, looky who's here. 'The Extreme.' More like extreme _loser."_ He cackled loudly, as if this were the cleverest line in the history of language.

Flynn's face was contorting in fury. "You thieving sons of bitches!" he roared.

Gudric sneered. "Oh, I get it," he said for the reporter's benefit. "You wanted our idea for yourself."

That did it. Flynn made a fist and with a thud, socked Gudric right in the nose. Blood began to pour, and Gudric doubled over to stem the flow. Edvard balled up his fists and swung. Flynn, being leaner and more nimble, easily jumped out of the way. He opened his pocket knife and slashed, cutting a gash in Edvard's arm.

By now the team had caught up with him. Vlad grabbed the flailing man and pinned his arms, while Hook relieved him of the knife. They pulled him away.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Edvard snarled, clutching his cut arm.

"You stole it! You know that Moore was the lab's idea! _My_ idea! My design!" He was beside himself with rage.

"Fiders keebers," Gudric said through his broken nose.

Flynn tried to lunge again, but he was being held back still by Vladimir. Gudric made to spit in his face, but fortunately, Vlad whirled him away, so the clot of saliva, mucus, and blood spattered on the ground instead.

"Shit, Rider!" Vlad said. "Chill! You heard what he said, the whole deal is contingent on it working! You know they'll never get that thing in the path of a tornado. They're too damn incompetent. Probably didn't even get it built right."

But Flynn wasn't paying attention to Vladimir's logic. He was too focused on the Stabbingtons and being robbed of his idea. "We're not finished, assholes!" he yelled as he was dragged away.

_"You_ are," came a new voice. This voice was female and very cold. A chill of horror went down his spine.

Ingrid Koenig stared at the restrained man with deep anger in her eyes—and disappointment. "You're through working here, Rider. You're a great chaser, have a real instinct for things, and have good ideas, and that is why we've been able to overlook your stunts."

"Stunts?" He tried to look innocent.

"Don't play innocent, Rider. You know what I mean. Spiking the coffee. Planting flasks of alcohol in the apprentices' desks. The constant pilfering of office supplies—and _don't_ deny it; I know you've been doing it for years. The outrageous risk-taking and thrill-seeking every single time you chase." She peered at him with sadness and disapproval as she enumerated his misdeeds.

He wanted to be cocky and unconcerned about it. He hoped he looked that way to her, at least. Inside he was flinching. _All great ways of coping with the past,_ a little voice scolded in his mind. _Really mature and well-adjusted._

"But assaulting people is too much. One thing has become clear to me, and that is that overlooking all this has not helped and has probably harmed you." She turned to the man restraining him. "Let him go, Vladimir. And as for _you_—get out of my sight. And _get help."_ The contempt and anger in her voice were unmistakable.

He was dumbstruck. He stared at Dr. Koenig, horrified and appalled. Finally his mouth seemed to rediscover words. "But Dr. Koenig... we were going to deploy the instruments the day after tomorrow."

"And they still will, I'm sure."

"Dr. Koenig. Just one more chance. Please. It's probably going to go High Risk."

She smirked. "Well, then, if you want to chase it, you'll have to have your own vehicle, won't you, Rider?"

He gaped in disbelief as the team took him away.

* * *

><p>That evening, Vladimir and Hook took him out for drinks in a sports bar on the east side of town. It was to be their treat, if "treat" were the proper word. Hook had the key to Flynn's prized possession, his white Mustang, and was going to be Flynn's driver, because both chasers expected him to get roaring drunk.<p>

By midnight, they might have been _disgusted_, but they were not disappointed.

He'd had six shots of whiskey and was issuing forth a stream of gratuitous swearing as loud as he could before one of the bigger chasers shushed him. Hook quickly came to regret choosing this particular bar, because Flynn was bellowing out statements that were attracting considerable unwanted attention from other patrons.

"Let's get you something else to settle you down," Vladimir said after an incoherent profanity-laced rant by Flynn against the supposed incompetence of the Corona soccer team and its goalie, Conli (who was actually performing above his usual standard, though this was not apparent to a drunk unemployed storm chaser). A number of sports fans in the bar had glared at him; his voice was drowning out the game on television.

"Yeah, I want a beer," Flynn said. "Vladimir. I want a beer."

Shortly the tall burly man returned with a bottle of a golden beer. "Here you go, boozehead," he muttered. "This one's actually called Corona."

Flynn took a huge chug of it and immediately twisted his face into a revolted expression. "Where'd you get this from, the toilets? It looks like piss. Tastes like piss too."

"You an expert on that?" Hook growled. He was rapidly losing his patience.

"It's fucking disgusting," Flynn said, slamming the bottle down on the table. "Should've expected it, though. Named Corona, so of course it's pisswater. This whole country is pisswater."

"Shut up, Rider," Hook said with a glance at the other patrons. "You're trashed."

"In vino veritas," Flynn slurred with a grin.

"Yeah, but you ain't drinking wine."

"Corona is nothing but backwater pisswater," he announced loudly, picking up the bottle and gesturing with it, causing beer to slosh around. "Damn the team, damn Conli, damn the lab, damn the Koenigs, and damn the whole fucking pisswater country." He smirked, obviously pleased with himself.

Hook and Vladimir tried to shut him up in the middle of this string of damnations, but it was too late. Another patron, a tall, toned guy with a mustache, was ambling over, looking extremely angry. He leaned over. Hook and Vladimir glared back at him, but Flynn simply leered cockily.

"You got a problem with this country, pinko?" the mustachio'd man growled.

"Oh," he said, sloshing even more beer on the table, "you are _very_ much mistaken. I'm not a pinko. I'm apathetic. I don't give a damn about politics. I don't even vote," he said in a boastful tone.

"Shut the hell _up, _Rider," Vladimir said. "Come on. We're going." He grabbed Flynn under the arms and hauled him out of his seat.

Hook turned to the mustachio'd man and snarled, "And you can fuck off. He's pissed off from personal problems and is just saying bullshit because he's drunk." He held up his hook threateningly.

"Yeah, funny, I've been drunk a lot, and I've never said that kind of 'bullshit.'"

"Yeah, I'm sure you're a damn model citizen," Vladimir growled. "If you want to get at him, you're gonna have to get through us, punk." At this, the stranger backed off, and with a glare, returned to his table.

"Come on," Hook snarled at Flynn. "I've got to get your sorry drunk ass home before you get yourself beat up. This was clearly a mistake."

They loaded him into the passenger seat of his Mustang and locked the door. He slouched in the seat. Vladimir, who had only had one round and hardly felt anything at all due to his massive size, went to his truck. It was custom-painted on both sides with armored deadly-looking unicorns. Vladimir was going to follow the Mustang to Flynn's apartment and then bring Hook back to his own place.

Hook was really angry. He slammed the driver's door shut and turned with disgust to the man collapsed on the seat next to him. "If you puke all over yourself, I ain't cleaning it up," he snarled. "And I also ain't hauling your vomit-covered ass out of the car. So if you don't want to sleep on the seat in your own bile, you'd better hold it in or get the window open in time."

"Hook," Flynn groaned, "I'm such an idiot."

"Yeah, that's been apparent to Vlad and me all night."

"What am I going to _do?"_ he moaned.

"I don't know," Hook admitted. "I guess you'll have to get another job."

Flynn put his head in his hands and moaned again. Apparently, he was past the "incoherent profane rage" stage of drunkenness and was now experiencing a hard comedown. Despite his irritation, Hook felt sympathy for the broken man next to him. He had intended to give his teammate a decent send-off, a night of fun, but it had turned into a disaster. He wouldn't admit it to Flynn, but he felt partially responsible for this. He and Vladimir shouldn't have continued buying him drinks. He couldn't handle as much as they could.

The ride was surprisingly uneventful. Hook did not say a word, and Flynn only groaned and muttered self-pitying complaints. When the Mustang pulled into the lot in front of his townhouse apartment, Flynn unlocked the door himself and hobbled out.

"You aren't getting your keys back just yet, Extreme," Hook said, unlocking the door to the house and letting him in. "Not until you're sober and stable." He filled up a big plastic jug with cold water, made sure that Flynn was able to get around with the jug without knocking into anything, and then locked him in.

Flynn, meanwhile, barely made it to his room before finally falling over. He guzzled some water directly out of the jug, dripping it all over himself, set the pitcher on the floor, and collapsed on the bed without even unmaking it.

* * *

><p>When he awoke the next day, it was nearly two o'clock and he had a roaring, throbbing headache. The light was so bright. It was burning holes in his eyes.<p>

"Damn," he groaned, trying to recall what had happened. A couple of the guys had taken him to a bar, and he had apparently gotten _really _drunk—drunker than he'd been in at least two years. _Why did I do that?_ he asked himself disgustedly. _I'm too old for it and I know what happens._

He rubbed his eyes clear of the muck that was blurring his vision. He had a vague memory of there being a pitcher of water somewhere around here. He glanced over the edge of the bed and saw it on the floor. _Thank God._ He grabbed it up like a man dying of thirst and drank straight from it for what felt like hours. Finally after half the gallon was gone, he heaved a breath and set it back down.

Then the rest of the memories of the previous day crashed back into his mind.

_I'm unemployed._

_I was fired._

_The Stabbingtons stole my idea, the miserable sons of bitches._

_I'm unemployed._

_That means I don't have any income._

He put his head in his hands. He was so close to breaking down in a sobbing fit, and that was just unmanly, even when there was no one to see. He did _not_ cry. Flynn Rider had never cried, not once. Only little children who had lost their parents were allowed to cry.

He spent the rest of the day moping and recovering from his hangover. None of the guys called him, which pissed him off until he realized that they were at work. At the lab where, twenty-four hours ago, he had assumed he would be designated the next director in a matter of days. _Director of the lab,_ he thought darkly. _Yeah, right. More likely that I'll be a hobo now._

At six, when the guys got off work, Flynn waited for calls that did not come. He grew increasingly irritated with the guys. He wondered what he had behaved like the previous night to make them not want anything further to do with him. He wondered if, perhaps, they never regarded him as a friend in the first place, merely a co-worker, then wondered why the thought disturbed him. He'd never felt a particular need for "friends." In fact, the thought of being emotionally dependent on anyone was a little frightening. He certainly wasn't comfortable making the calls himself, but he felt offended that they did not want to call _him._ So what was going on?

He wrote off these bizarre emotions to messed up body chemistry from the previous night's drinking binge and decided instead to think about how he might be able to get back into the Koenigs' good graces. The canister of instruments popped to the forefront of his thoughts. Moore was the ticket. Moore was always going to be the ticket, whether to a directorship or—at this point—a full-time paying job again. Ingrid Koenig was just mad at him because he'd attacked the Stabbingtons in public. He'd embarrassed her. But she and her husband had staked their lab's reputation on the success of Moore, and there was no getting around the fact that Moore was his idea.

_I've got to chase with them tomorrow,_ he thought. _Even if it's in my own vehicle. The Mustang wasn't meant to be a chase vehicle, but it's not like I have any choice. I've got to be there, especially if it goes High Risk. They'll definitely try to deploy then. And unlike the Stabbingtons, who don't know anything about how to chase, they'll be in a position to get actual data. They'll get the data and set the record straight about who owns the design, and then the idiots' business deal is off. I just have to be there when history happens._

Then he realized that he did not know where his keys were.

After three hours of turning his apartment upside down to try to find the keys, he collapsed in a chair and tried to think about it logically. It was simply not possible that he had driven himself back, given the condition that he had been in. He wouldn't have made it around the first intersection. And yet he did seem to recall being in the Mustang on the way back. He definitely remembered going out to the bar in it, and at least two chasers—Hook and Vladimir—were with him. One of them must have driven him back and put the keys down somewhere while he crashed on his bed. He tried calling both of them, but there was no answer.

Finally, in unmitigated disgust—whether with the chase team or with himself, he was not sure—he threw a frozen dinner into the microwave, wolfed it down along with a can of soda, showered, and collapsed in bed again. He set his alarm for 6:00. That would give him time to check the severe weather outlook and make his calls.

* * *

><p><em>Knock, knock.<em>

Flynn awoke early the following morning. It was still pitch black outside. He glanced at his alarm clock. Five o'clock. He groaned. Only an hour of sleep left. He rolled over to try to go back to sleep when he heard the knock again.

"What the hell?" he muttered, throwing on some clothes over his underwear and going to answer the door. Who on earth could be here at this unholy hour? He hoped it was Hook or Vladimir with his keys.

He fumbled his way downstairs and opened the front door without looking out the peephole first. He barely had time to register the towering bulk of the Stabbington brothers before Gudric socked him in the gut.

"That's for my nose," he snarled as Flynn doubled over. Edvard pinned his arms and hauled him out of the house to where their shiny black Crown Enterprises-owned truck was parked. Flynn felt another wave of pain as Edvard head-butted him.

He was barely conscious as he felt himself being thrown into the back seat and his hands bound. The thugs piled into the front and slammed the door. The engine revved, and the truck began racing away from the townhouse.

Flynn tried his best to stay conscious without the Stabbingtons noticing it. He opened his eyes just a slit and caught sight of the lamplit bridge. So they were leaving the island. His bruised stomach twisted. He hoped they weren't going to dump him in the ocean. But the truck continued on to the mainland, farther and farther, as the sun began to rise.

Finally Edvard spoke. "This is what it's like to be locked up in the back of a vehicle, bastard. And I know you're awake."

Flynn did not respond.

"We owe you something," said Gudric, who Flynn realized was driving.

"Yeah, in fact, we owe you a lot. We owe you for all the times you shut us up in the back of that van and drove through shit weather just to fuck us up."

"Where are we going?" Flynn finally asked.

"The swamp," Edvard growled. "They'll _never _find your body in there, punk."

For not the first time that morning, Flynn felt really afraid. He had been afraid from the start that they intended to murder him, but having it stated outright like this made it more real. He had to get out of here. He began thinking about what he might be able to do. Fortunately, he had considerable skill with knots, and he quickly had the bonds on his hands untied and reworked into a loose knot. The brothers had not noticed. Now all he needed was a chance to make a dash for it.

As the air became more humid and they approached the swamp, the signs of civilization became more and more sparse. Soon the only types of buildings were shabby-looking shacks, convenience stores, and the occasional redneck bar.

"I need to take a crap," Gudric muttered, pulling the van over at a filling station. He slouched out of the van and slammed the door.

When he was out of sight, Flynn seized the opportunity. He leaped over the seat, opened the front door, and dashed out. Then he ran as hard as he could, ignoring Edvard's yells of rage as he made his escape.

He soon heard thumps and realized that the Stabbingtons were following him, but he had a head start, and he was faster and more nimble. He did not stop running, however, and kept away from roads, driveways, and even clear patches of ground. Any advantage he had would be lost if they could run him down in the truck.

He was aiming for the swamp, about half a mile away from the fueling station. There were no roads in there, so the truck couldn't get in. The Stabbingtons might try to follow him on foot, but at least there was a chance he could evade them among the trees, shrubs, and thicket.

"You just try that, Rider!" Edvard's voice carried as Flynn entered the darkness of the wooded swamp. "You think you've escaped us, but you won't come out of there alive, so it don't matter!"

"Yeah, that place is full of quicksand and snakes and yellow jackets!"

"And if you get into the woods, there's wolves!"

Flynn didn't care. He knew he was definitely dead if they got hold of him again, whereas he stood a chance in the swamp. He kept running. It didn't sound like they were going to try tracking him down on foot, but he wasn't going to risk it. He dashed through marsh, leaped over thorny vines, splashed through murky water, and gave thanks for his tall leather boots when he saw a nest of adders that lunged at him as he passed. He kept running. He ran and ran until his legs were literally about to give out.

Finally he couldn't go any further. He paused to catch his breath and listened for the telltale sounds of footsteps, particularly those of big, noisy thugs. There was nothing, just the hum of insects and the occasional chirp of a bird. He was really, really deep in the swamp. Then he noticed that he was standing in mud. This wouldn't do. He had to find a decent place to rest and plot his next move. Heaving a breath, he glanced up toward the sky...

...And noticed that he couldn't see it. Instead he found himself facing a very extensive canopy—and something else. It looked for all the world like a treehouse fifty feet up. He peered around. Yes, it was a treehouse in the middle of the swamp, anchored with four thick posts that looked exactly like tree trunks. There was no sign of occupancy, no car or anything else indicating that human beings lived there. Well, it'd have to do. Flynn began to ascend one of the trees, grateful for his extensive experience as a child climbing trees on his parents' homestead... retrieving his satchel from the debarked tree... _No, can't think of that._

He made his way up, climbed the wood-plank walls, and breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of a window. He leaped in, steadied himself, and took a deep breath.

_CLUNK._

Pain, this time on the back of his head. That was it. It was finally too much for his abused body to take. He didn't even have time to think of what might have happened _this _time before he collapsed to the floor unconscious.


	4. Swamp Girl

**Chapter 4: Swamp Girl**

* * *

><p>When Flynn opened his eyes, the first thing he noticed was that he could not move. <em>Oh, this is bad. This is very, very bad.<em> He was sure that the brothers had caught up with him, and he was about to be beaten to death or cut into pieces or both. He blinked and tried to bring his vision into focus.

He was in a chair, tied up with rope. A sinking feeling settled in his stomach. That was definitely a point in favor of his having been caught.

He'd climbed into this weird house on stilts, leaped through a window, and then—what? He couldn't recall what happened. Pain, certainly. Somebody must have knocked him out, and he could think of only two people who would want to do that. He decided he might as well look around and see how bad this was.

He finally focused his vision and noticed something that immediately struck him as very strange. The walls were painted from floor to ceiling with pictures. Animals, swirling vines, flowers, starburst designs... girls with long yellow hair... Flynn suddenly felt a slight ray of hope. Slight, but it was there. Surely the person who had done all this was a woman. The designs were very feminine in style.

"Struggling... struggling is pointless."

Okay, the voice was _definitely _female.

"I'm not afraid of you."

_Yeah, could've fooled me,_ he thought. Her voice was trembling.

A girl stepped into the light. A small-figured girl with blonde hair that fell down past her waist, past her knees... all the way down to her ankles. He had never seen hair that long in his life. She was dressed in a purple skirt and a pink camisole top, which showed off her figure very well. Any other time, Flynn would have been gaping admiringly at her. There was something familiar about her face. He was sure he had seen a face similar to that recently. Could he possibly have met this girl before? No, he would definitely remember the hair. So why did she seem so familiar to him?

"Who are you, and what are you doing here?" She raised the iron skillet that he suddenly noticed she was holding.

He decided that he'd better answer. He had made a connection between that pan and the gaps in his memories between jumping through the window and finding himself in the present situation, and he did not want it to happen again. He had to get out of here and contact his chase team. "Hey, Blondie."

"Rapunzel."

He blinked. "My sympathies." He cleared his throat. "All right. The name's Flynn Rider. Storm chaser _extraordinaire,_ best-looking guy in Corona, and completely at your mercy, beautiful." He put on The Smolder. Not once had it failed him with a woman, whatever it was he wanted from her. In this case, all he really wanted from this strange backwoods girl was to be let out of there.

She glared back and raised the pan higher. "I asked you what you were doing here, _Flynn Rider."_

Oh, she was going to be a tough customer. He heaved a sigh. The outbreak was going to begin in the early afternoon, and he really did not need any more delays. "Okay, look. I was running through this swamp, trying to avoid these crazy guys who wanted to kill me. I needed a place to hide and saw a cabin. That's all I'm doing here."

Her mouth dropped open a little. "You... you're telling the truth?"

"Yes!"

"So... you're not a smuggler?"

"No! I was _abducted_. I got away. I saw your house. I climbed through the window. End of story!" He could not believe this.

"One moment," she said in a flustered voice, and dashed out of the room and upstairs to the loft. "I need to talk to Pascal."

_Pascal? Does she have a brother or something? _But nothing could have prepared Flynn for the sight that met his eyes when she returned from the loft. She had a green snake draped around her neck. It was very clearly a python. _What the hell?_

"Uh... is that snake Pascal?"

"Of course." She spoke in natural tones, as if this were obvious.

"And... you talk to that snake."

"Well, sure."

_OK, I'm actually really freaked out now._ "Does he... answer back?" He wasn't sure he wanted to hear the answer.

"Not in words, silly. Expressions."

_Small relief._ "Uh, Blondie—"

"Be quiet!" She whirled around, back to him, and began to mutter to the snake. Flynn stared, transfixed. He had to admit, it really did look like the snake's head shifted and its tongue darted about in readable responses to what she said. Maybe she wasn't completely crazy, just very sheltered, and didn't know that snakes couldn't understand—

"I know! I think he's telling the truth too."

"What choice did I have?"

"But I don't know what to do with him!"

He knew he shouldn't. He knew that he was, as he had rightly (if flirtatiously) said, completely at the mercy of a weird swamp-dwelling woman who talked to snakes, tied him to a chair, and threatened him with an iron skillet that he _knew _she was more than willing to use. He didn't even _want _her. He had had more than enough out-of-the-ordinary events today. But he couldn't resist an opening like this. He smirked, wagged an eyebrow, and said in a sultry voice, "Oh, I have some ideas for things you can do with me."

She stopped talking and turned around very slowly. Her eyes narrowed. She raised the skillet. Shit. One of these days he would learn—

_WHACK._

* * *

><p>Something was tickling his ear. Something hissing. <em>WHAT?<em> Flynn's eyes popped open. Merely inches from his face stood the strange blond girl—Rapunzel—and that python of hers. It was darting its forked tongue in his ear. A strange taste was in his mouth.

"Oh my God!" he exclaimed. "What is _wrong_ with you?"

She smirked and drew away, holding a small bottle of something in her hands. He licked his lips and tasted the strange taste again. Had she poisoned him with whatever that crap was? "What is that stuff?" he asked.

"Medicine," she said. "You looked pretty battered."

"I _am _pretty battered," he said pitifully. "It's really not been a good past two days for me, and beating me on the head with an iron skillet doesn't help." He paused. "But I do feel somewhat better, and I shouldn't. What's in that crap anyway?"

"It's made from flowers."

"Flowers."

"Yup."

He wondered if the medicine were actually a hallucinogenic drug, but then, he'd taken marijuana before and knew the effect it would have on him. Nothing about his current perception seemed off. His consciousness seemed normal, and in fact, he really did feel better than he'd felt since... well, since he had been fired. He recalled stories about folk medicine and herbal remedies, and wondered if this girl had discovered some swamp plant that really did promote quick healing.

"What kind of flowers?" he asked.

She glowered at him. "I don't know their name, and I didn't wake you up to discuss medicine. Pascal and I have finished our conference, and I have decided to offer you a deal."

"Deal?"

"You called yourself a 'storm chaser.'"

He grinned. "I am _the _storm chaser around here, sweetie."

She ignored this and strode across the room to the fireplace. Something stood in front of it, covered in a sheet of blue cloth. With a flourish, she pulled away the cloth to reveal an easel propping up a painting of stylized clouds, lightning, and... tornadoes.

"Do you know what these are?" She gestured at one of her stylized whirlwinds.

What was she asking? Had she seriously no idea what tornadoes were? Was there something in the painting that he was missing?

"You don't mean the tornadoes, do you?"

"Tornadoes. So that's what they're called." She stroked the head of the python, then turned to face him. "All right. I think that this afternoon, some of these 'tornadoes' will appear."

"You better believe they will," he said smoothly.

"You will take me with you, chase down these tornadoes, and return me here safely."

_Oh no. No. No backwoods weirdos tagging along with me when I find the guys. Absolutely not._ He cleared his throat. "Yeah, no can do. Ordinarily I'd happily give you a chase tour, but today, I've got a major job to do when this system comes through, so I won't be taking you anywhere."

She glared. "Something brought you to this house, _Flynn Rider._ Call it what you will, fate, destiny—"

"A pair of homicidal maniacs?"

"—and so, I have made the decision to trust you. But trust me when I tell you this." She stepped over to him and pointed the pan directly in front of his eyes. "You will stay in that chair, tied up, until you take me chasing tornadoes with you. If that means _next spring, _so be it. I _promise."_

He cleared his throat. "Look, it _really_ wouldn't be good for you to be found holding me hostage here. That's _highly _illegal, you know. So nice try, but that threat has no teeth. I'm intending to meet up with my team and report the people who abducted me to the police. Speaking of which, I'd like to use your phone."

"Phone?" She looked confused.

"Yeah, you know, a phone? To call people with?"

She stared blankly at him.

Suddenly a really, really bad idea occurred to him. _You've got to be kidding me, _he thought. _First I'm abducted, then I'm chased into this swamp running for my life, and then I leap into some backwoods cabin in the middle of absolute nowhere with no phone?_ "You... don't have a phone, I take it."

She shook her head.

_Shit shit shit._ He _could _be out here for a very long time, and no one would have a clue how to reach him or even if he was alive. This was _really _not his day.

"Do you live out here all by yourself? And—Pascal?" he said, reluctantly uttering the snake's name.

"No, my mother lives here too."

"Is she here right now?"

"Of course not. She's walking to the coast to pick up some shells to make paint."

So no car either, they lived in the middle of nowhere, and they made their own paint. The mother must be some kind of survivalist determined to live off the grid. It would figure that he'd stumble into the house of someone like that on a day as big as this one promised to be. He sighed. "Look, Blondie. As much as I'd love to take you to see the tornadoes, I can't. Why don't you ask your mother?"

"She won't let me leave—" Suddenly the girl broke off and turned away, but the damage was done.

_Good Lord, _he thought. _No wonder she's strange. The mother won't let her leave the forest and doesn't have a phone. What kind of people are these? Poor kid._ Something strange and alien began to stir in his chest. He supposed the name for it was compassion. Yes, that was what people called it.

All of a sudden something occurred to him. She had _known _that there were going to be storms that evening. How? The sky was clear, with only puffy little cumulus clouds here and there. They probably had no means of communication with the outside world. How could she have known? "Uh, Blondie, can I ask you something?"

"Rapunzel. And yes."

"How did you know that there were going to be tornadoes later today?"

"Oh, I have instruments for monitoring the weather. I've studied patterns for years."

He blinked. "Mind untying me? I'd kind of like to have a look."

She stared skeptically at him. "You'll just run away if I do, I'm sure."

He put on a calculated pout. "I thought you said you _trusted_ me."

A startled look came over her face; then her eyes narrowed. "You talked me out of it," she snapped.

He kept up the pout.

With a sigh, she walked around to the back of his chair. He craned his neck to see what she was doing, but it was no use. Then he felt his legs being untied. With a gasp of relief, he stood up.

He was not actually planning to dash for the window, nor would he have attempted it as long as his hands were tied, but Rapunzel evidently did not intend to give him the chance. With a smirk, she draped her python around his neck in coils. "If you make any false moves, Pascal will squeeze you," she said dangerously.

He didn't dare argue. This snake around his neck was actually really intimidating. _Pythons are predatory,_ Flynn thought._ They squeeze their prey to death and then swallow it whole._ He didn't think this particular python could swallow him, at least, but it was definitely in a position to squeeze him to death. He allowed Rapunzel to lead him upstairs, thinking that ordinarily, it would be a good thing for an attractive woman to lead him by the arm to her bedroom—but not if his hands were tied up, a dangerous snake was coiled around his neck, and the attractive woman in question was keeping him in her house with a death threat.

"So, Rapunzel," he said, more to calm himself than to actually hold a conversation, "why is the snake named Pascal? Is it named after someone?"

"No," she said. "His full name is Hectopascal, but that's too long and not as cute."

_"What?"_ Flynn sputtered. "You named your snake after a unit of atmospheric pressure?"

"I know it's weird," she said, blushing and hiding her face.

"It's weird all right, but I have to admit, I'm kind of impressed."

She smiled and then ducked down again. "All right. Here." She threw aside a curtain of multicolored beads, pulled Flynn over to a door, opened it, and pushed him out onto a balcony. She removed the snake from his neck—_thank you, Lord—_and coiled it over the railing.

He blinked. He was facing treetops. He knew the house was about that high up, but it was somehow different seeing it from this angle.

"It's right here," Rapunzel said hesitantly, gesturing at something in the corner. Flynn turned to look.

It was a homemade weather station. There was a weathervane and anemometer, a barometer, a rain gauge, and instruments for measuring the temperature and dew point. There was also a radio.

"What's this for?" he asked her, trying through his tied hands to gesture at the radio.

"Oh," she said. "That picks up data from my balloons."

"Balloons?"

"My mother brings me balloons with little instrument packages every now and then. I only get three a month, so I have to choose when I launch them."

"You take your own _soundings?"_

"Is that what they are? Let me show you one, actually." She went back into the bedroom and emerged with a plot.

He stared in disbelief. It was a Skew-T. And it was from that morning.

"She is okay with this because she is glad I'm content learning about the outside world this way," Rapunzel said. "But I'm _not._ I can _see _these—tornadoes—from the treetops. I want to see them up close and in person."

Flynn had to admit that he really did feel sorry for her now. And he was intrigued by her clear interest in and knowledge of the weather. He hated to have to tell her that he couldn't take her with him. He really did. But still... she wasn't _his_ responsibility. He glanced up to break the bad news to her when he realized that she wasn't there.

She emerged from the room again, this time carrying a big cardboard box.

"There's something else," she said in a hushed, almost guilty voice. "Mother doesn't know about these. But I have been _planning _to go and see the tornadoes. I have devices to measure inside of them. I've been making them for years out of extra supplies... instruments from balloons that I told her I'd sent up but never did..." She picked up a handful of something from the box and held it out to him.

He gasped, then sucked in his breath. Her hands held delicate instruments, about the size of tennis balls, with metal propellers on top of them. He could hardly believe his eyes. Why hadn't he thought of this?

"Do they... do they _work?"_

"I think so. I tossed one into a gale one time, when there was a rainstorm, and it sent reasonable data back to my radio."

_What a fantastic idea,_ Flynn thought. _If Moore doesn't work—or even if it does—this is so much better to deploy into a tornado. This is exactly what I need to suck up to the Koenigs and get hired again._ Suddenly he came to a resolution.

"Rapunzel," he said, "I have a counter-offer for you."

"Oh?"

"I will take you to see the tornadoes today if you will bring these to the laboratory where I work. This is a really amazing idea, and it can be put into practice if you would give—let me show the design to my employers."

Her eyes widened. "Really?"

"Really. This is a great idea."

"You'll _really _take me chasing storms with you?" she squealed. He nodded. "This is wonderful!" She began to dance giddily around the balcony, holding his bound hands and swinging him around.

"Uh, Rapunzel—"

"Hmm?"

"Would you untie my hands?"

"Oh! Sorry!" She quickly untied the knot and took the ropes off.

He stretched his wrists. "Now," he said, "there's no time to lose. The outbreak is due to begin in a couple of hours. I've got to meet up with my team, which means I've got to get out of this swamp—uh, what are you doing?"

She was uncoiling the snake. "Can't Pascal come along?"

He shuddered. "No. Sorry, but a storm chase vehicle is no place for a snake."

She glared at him. "Pascal is coming along."

"Okay, okay. But can't you put him in a cage or something?"

She turned as white as a ghost.

Flynn didn't know why she had reacted that way, but he didn't want her passing out. Maybe she'd owned a previous pet that died in a cage, and it disturbed her. "Or a box? Anything? I just think he might freak out being loose in a car." _And I would definitely freak out having him loose in the car._

"He can go in a box," Rapunzel agreed. She went into her bedroom, got down on her knees—Flynn tried to avoid looking at her butt before finally giving in and staring—and withdrew another box from under her bed, into which she placed the snake.

"Now," she said, "since you don't get to see my sensors up close until _after _I've seen some tornadoes, I'm sealing the box." She smirked at him, and before he could object, she had retrieved a jar of what looked like homemade glue—created from tree sap, from the looks of it—and a roll of paper, which she cut into strips. She painted the paper strips with the glue, closed the flaps to her box of sensors, and sealed that box shut.

_Clever girl, _Flynn thought ruefully. He _had _been intending to swipe one of the sensors. Well, he wasn't going to let her get the best of him. His gaze flitted around her room for something else he could steal. It was really a strange bedroom, with practically everything painted with the same art deco-type designs, and knickknacks everywhere. There was so much to choose from. He settled on a bottle of shampoo or something from her dresser. With hair like that, she _definitely _would need shampoo, and there was no point in stealing something that was of no use to her.

He had just stashed the shampoo bottle in his pocket—_ugh, I need my satchel, _he thought—when she looked up. "All right, Flynn. Ready to go?"

"Am I ever," he said.

"Then let's go!" A light seemed to gleam in her green eyes.

"Yup. Let's go catch some tornadoes, Blondie."


	5. Out of the Swamp

**Chapter 5: Out of the Swamp  
><strong>

* * *

><p>Flynn knew that the first thing they had to do was to find a way to get out of the cabin. "How do you and your mom get in and out of here?" he asked her.<p>

"Oh," she said, turning away as if to hide her face from him, "my mom uses a rope ladder to get down, and she calls to me to let it down when she's ready to come back up."

That was a strange answer, he thought. "Your _mom?_ What about when both of you are out and there's nobody to let the ladder down? Do you leave it out, attached to something?"

She didn't seem to want to answer this, turning red at the question, and he decided not to press the point. Apparently, they never went out together. This whole situation was becoming increasingly disturbing to him, and he had a creepy feeling that he had just scraped the surface of the crazy. One thing was for sure, though. Rapunzel definitely needed to get out of this place. It was unhealthy. He had rapidly changed his opinion about her coming along and was quite glad that, if he _had_ to be abducted and chased into the swamp, he had found this place. It would be good for her to get out.

"Well, never mind," he said quickly. "Do you know where this ladder is kept?"

"It's in my mom's bedroom," she said, dashing away to retrieve it.

After she brought out the ladder, he had to persuade her to get a pair of her mother's shoes, as she did not seem to own any boots herself—a fact that he found utterly bizarre, considering that she lived in the middle of a swamp. He then had to convince her that her ankle-length hair needed to be braided and put up so that it didn't trail to the ground, but she didn't know how to braid it herself, so he had to do the job.

He didn't really know anything about hair. His own hair was perfect with little to no maintenance. He could swim completely submerged, and when he came out of the water, it would dry naturally in its faultless state. He knew how to do a basic braid, and he decided that the best way to deal with hair this long was to part it in threes, braid each third, and then braid the three braids together. It was really silky hair, and he found that he rather liked the feel of it in his hands as she sat in front of him.

As soon as he began parting it in threes, she began shivering. Her whole body trembled, especially when his hands were near her scalp.

"You okay?" he asked. He had to ask; he wondered if the mother had physically abused her and created an aversion to touch. It wasn't normal for someone to respond this way to having her hair done.

"I'm fine," she gasped. "It feels so... _nice."_

Well, _that _wasn't what he expected to hear. Apparently, she liked it too. He continued to part and braid her hair, making a point of touching her earlobes or her neck, even when he didn't have to. Her shivering soon gave way to little moans of pleasure as he plaited her hair.

There _was_ something very intimate about doing her hair, but to his surprise, he didn't find himself becoming turned on by this reaction at all. Instead, he felt that strange, alien emotion—compassion—once more. He wondered what kind of upbringing she could possibly have _had_ to react this way. Her moans were not _passionate, _per se, and certainly not sexual. They were pure exclamations of pleasure at being touched, and they were almost childlike. It seemed completely innocent. He wondered if her mother showed her any affection at all or if she'd had any friends in her life. He hadn't, but he knew that he was exceptional in that he didn't need any. It just didn't seem right for a girl who obviously liked affection to not have anyone to give it to her.

When he finished, the braid reached down to her knees. It was still very long, but at least it wouldn't drag in the mud or blow around in the wind. She turned around and beamed at him. He felt a twinge of guilt at the travel-size shampoo bottle (or whatever it was) in his pocket, but brushed that emotion aside.

_You're getting way too caught up in this,_ he scolded himself. _You can't get attached. Give her a thrill ride, since she wants it so badly. Get the sensors from her. Bring her back to this cabin and make tracks to the lab with the instruments. That's all you need to do. She can leave of her own accord in the future, if she's old enough._

"Hey, Rapunzel," he said, following his thought, "I was wondering. How old are you, exactly?"

"Eighteen."

"Huh. Did you ever go to school?" He knew not to ask if she'd ever gone out as an apprentice. Not everyone did, only those who were planning to specialize in a skilled profession in lieu of a general "office job" or "factory job." They typically began when the person had finished their general education (usually at age 14) and lasted seven years. From that point, one could obtain a paying position in that profession (as he had done) or, if they wanted, go on to get a professional degree in it, as the Koenigs apparently had done. In any case, it was a very worldly thing to do, and it was inconceivable that Rapunzel would have ever had one, even one that she didn't complete.

"Mother taught me here," she replied. Somehow, he was not surprised to hear it.

It was a strange party that finally climbed down the ladder, which Flynn affixed with one of his knots to Rapunzel's balcony. She was holding her taped-up box of instruments. He had been stuck with the open box containing the snake. That had not been his choice, but she made it very evident that she did not trust him with the sensors.

Once they were on the soft ground, she took a deep breath, as if she were steadying herself. Then she let out a giddy scream and began dancing in the mud.

"Blondie, what are you doing?" he asked, holding the snake's box and staring.

"Oh," she said, blushing, "I'm sorry. You probably want to get moving."

"I do, but it's not that, exactly," he muttered as they began to walk away from the cabin. He had decided that they should not come out of the swamp in the same place that he had entered it. He didn't think the Stabbingtons would still be there, but he didn't want to run the risk.

"What is it, then?"

He considered what to say. "You're just very exuberant, and I wondered what was so exciting about being on the ground."

She didn't answer.

"You don't get out of that cabin much, I bet."

"No," she said very quietly. "I don't."

"Well, I don't suppose it would be of any use to ask you what was the best path through the swamp, then."

She shook her head. He sighed and began to lead them through the swamp.

* * *

><p>He was naturally good at navigating, and in about half an hour, they had come out of the swamp in a different location. A road stretched out before them, and there was a small, shabby-looking motel. It was a two-story strip motel with cheap iron railings lining the second level. A neon sign identified a bar and lounge occupying part of the first floor. The name of the place was the Duck Motel. Keeping himself hidden in the swamp shadows, he glanced around the parking lot for signs of the Stabbingtons' black truck, but saw no vehicle resembling it. <em>All right,<em> Flynn thought. _This will do._

"We'll rest here, get something to drink, and I'll call my team," he said, leading her out of the woods and into the hotel lounge. He closed the flaps on Pascal's box, assuming—probably correctly—that the hotel staff would not be all that pleased to see a live python brought into the lobby.

It turned out that it was only about eleven in the morning. Flynn was relieved that he had not lost any more time than that. There was still plenty of time before the outbreak began in earnest. He also realized that he was starving, having run, walked, climbed, and been knocked out more than once, all on an empty stomach. He did not have his wallet with him and really hoped that he had some money in these pants. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two fives. It was more than enough to make a phone call. He decided to dial Hook.

"Hook?" he said when the other man answered the phone. "It's Flynn."

"My God!" Hook exclaimed. "Where _are _you? We're in a panic here."

"Yeah, I'm lucky I'm not dead," Flynn said, feeling relief wash over him over the fact that the team was panicked over _him_. "I'll explain in a bit, but I'm at this little motel outside the swamp on the mainland. It's called the Duck Motel."

"Okay, I know where that is."

"Yeah. And I was wondering—what did you do with my keys when you brought me home that night?"

"Oh, yeah," Hook said somewhat sheepishly. "I kept 'em. You were pretty drunk, and I didn't want you to have the ability to even get in that car, let alone drive it."

"You have my house keys too, then?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Could you guys bring the Mustang out here, then? And bring me a new set of clothes, my blue jacket, and my satchel. My phone ought to be in it, but make sure, would you? And my wallet."

There was a pause. "Rider, even for you, this is completely crazy. How the hell did you get out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere without your clothes, your phone, or your wallet, with no car?"

"The Stabbingtons abducted me from my own house."

Another pause. "You are just shitting me. How'd you really get out there?"

"It's true."

"It's true? Then it's all right if I report them to the police? You know it's pretty bad to file a false police report."

"Go ahead. It is completely true and I'll stand by it if questioned."

Hook was silent again. "Are you safe, then?" he finally said.

"Yeah. I'm safe, and I've got somebody with me. It's a long story, but I'll explain it all when you guys get here. Thanks a bunch."

He hung up the phone and turned to Rapunzel, who was examining the food and drinks in the little lounge. The place did not serve alcoholic drinks this early in the day, but they could get sodas, tea, or coffee.

"I haven't got a lot of money," Flynn said, somewhat apologetically, "but more is on the way. How about some snacks, in the meantime? There should be enough for—say—a doughnut apiece?" He examined the choices. "Or a granola bar. Something around that same price. Motel food sure is expensive."

"I'll have a granola bar," she said.

"What do you want to drink?"

She stared at the selection of sodas, fascinated. "I've never had any of those before. Are they good?"

He gaped at her in amazement. "You've never had soda before."

"No."

He could hardly believe this. He had never known of anyone this sheltered in his life. It really was a good thing he had come her way, and he didn't particularly like the idea of putting her back in the cabin after the day was over. But he quickly shoved this thought out of his head. "Well," he said, "they're good. If you've only had things like tea and fruit juice and whatever, you might want to stick with something lemon-lime flavored."

"Okay."

He selected a doughnut and a cola for himself, paid for their snacks, and sat down with her in the lounge to eat and wait for the team to arrive. He had become intensely curious about her back story, and he decided to explain a few things to her. Something in him _really _didn't like the idea of exposing her to a group of rough-and-tumble guys without at least breaking her in to the outside world a little bit first. It was a strange feeling. He'd _never _felt _protective _of anyone before.

He showed her the ladies' room, assuming—correctly, it turned out—that she did not have indoor plumbing in the cabin. The thought made him shudder. While she went to investigate and do her business, he went into the men's room to clean off his boots—now that he knew _that _unpleasant little detail, he did not really want to think too hard about what he might have been walking through. She came out beaming. "It's so _efficient!"_ she exclaimed.

"Yeah," he said. He didn't really want to discuss this subject, so he took her back to the lounge and began explaining to her about basic modern conveniences such as phones, televisions, and automobiles. As he began to explain about electricity, something struck him.

"Hey, Rapunzel," he said. "What powered your weather station? I didn't think you would have power in that cabin, but you obviously do."

"Mother put up solar collectors on the roof," she said. "They produce it. I don't know how it works."

"Active solar," Flynn muttered. "Wow." _The woman is hell-bent on isolating them from everyone else in every way possible. What on earth goes on in that cabin? What's she trying to hide?_

He stared at the young woman next to him, whose attention had already been distracted by the candy machines in the lobby. Everything was interesting to her. It was so cute and endearing. It reminded him of what it had been like to be a child. _No, better not think too hard about your childhood,_ he thought as other, darker memories crashed into his mind. Shaking his head to try to clear it, he got up and deposited a coin into one of the candy machines to buy some for her.

* * *

><p>The entire team showed up in about an hour. Hook's Barn Burner van led the way, and he had silent Ulf along with him. Vladimir drove his unicorn truck, with Moore loaded in the back, and Attila was with him. It was Bignose who was driving Flynn's white Mustang. Flynn grabbed Rapunzel's hand and led her out of the shabby motel as they pulled into the mostly empty parking lot.<p>

"Here you go," Bignose said, opening the door to the car and getting out. "Your stuff is all in there. Now, we're all wondering, what did the—_oh._ I don't believe I caught your name," he said politely to Rapunzel.

"This is Rapunzel," Flynn said. "She lives in the woods." For some reason, he didn't want to say _swamp._ "She's interested in the weather and is coming along on the chase. As for how I met her... _well."_

He began to tell the others what had happened to him since the Stabbingtons abducted him. When he came to the part where he met her, he suddenly felt bad about mentioning that he had only brought her along because she'd promised him something. He did not mention the sensors that she'd invented, nor the strange environment that she had grown up in, merely saying that her mother lived a simple life and that they didn't get out that much. He didn't know why (or didn't want to admit to himself), but he didn't like the idea of these guys making fun of her for something that wasn't her fault.

When he was finished, he turned to Hook. "So that's how _my _morning has gone. What about you? Did you report the Stabbingtons to the police?"

"Yeah," Hook said, an unhappy look coming over his face. "I did. They apparently questioned them, and obviously they denied everything. Without any evidence, there's nothing to go on."

Flynn could not believe it. "But I was in that truck! There ought to be some hair or something on the seat. They can DNA it."

"Yeah, and they probably will, but that don't prove that you were abducted. Unfortunately there's more evidence that _you _assaulted _Gudric_, punching his ugly nose and all."

"This is such crap!" Flynn exclaimed. "Corona law enforcement is utterly worthless!"

"Yeah, always has been. You know they gave up the chase for Little Koenig after like a week."

That was the Koenigs' kidnapped baby. He hadn't thought about that in a while. "Oh, they did? I didn't know that. Not surprised, though."

"So yeah, they're pathetic."

"This is crap," he repeated. "Am I going to have to spend the rest of my life watching my back for the Stabbingtons?"

"Hey, think positive," Bignose put in. "Maybe they'll get arrested for something else."

"Yeah, maybe."

They all stared at the ground for a while. It was Rapunzel who broke the silence. "So, when is the outbreak supposed to start?"

"Now."

"_What?"_ Flynn exclaimed. "They moved it up? Well, what are we waiting for? Let's get the hell out of here." He took his keys from Bignose, leaped into the car, and noticed that his satchel was indeed there. Before Rapunzel could get in or notice what he was doing, he transferred the little bottle from his pants to the satchel. It was starting to burn a proverbial hole in his pocket, and he preferred to have it in a place where he couldn't actually feel it.

He didn't change his clothes. There was no time. But he did put on his blue jacket. It was the first item he'd bought for himself after going to work at the lab, and he never chased without it.


	6. The Chase Begins

**Chapter 6: The Chase Begins**

* * *

><p>It felt great to be on the road again in his <em>own <em>vehicle. The white Mustang led the way, with the unicorn truck following behind and the Barn Burner bringing up the rear. In the past, Flynn had chased in the lab's truck—another sign, he had once thought, of the Koenigs' preference for him—and had purchased the Mustang as a status symbol for his own personal use, but there was a kind of freedom in having one's own car on trips like this. He could do whatever he wanted without even a hint of fear or guilt in the back of his mind. With the lab truck, he had always worried a little bit that he was going to do damage to it that the Koenigs would not appreciate. He had full coverage on his car.

Rapunzel had the box of sensors stashed in the trunk. She really was not going to chance him looking at them. The box containing the snake was situated on the floor boards under her feet. She had wanted to put it in the back, but Flynn had put his foot down. He wanted that thing where somebody could watch it. He didn't want it coiling around his head while he was driving. Rapunzel had argued that she would tell Pascal not to do that, but Flynn did not believe that the snake would follow orders.

The team had radios tuned to the same frequency, which they used to communicate. It was simpler than using their cell phones for everything. Over the radio, the three drivers plotted their course. The Barn Burner was equipped with a mobile radar, which was picking up some interesting signals in the distance.

Rapunzel was staring at the sky, waiting, it seemed, for funnels to drop out of every puffy white cloud she could see. He knew better. Nothing here was going to produce anything. The heart of the outbreak was farther west. Off in the distance, the clouds were taller and darker.

"Look out that way," he said, pointing at the horizon. "See that tall cloud? The one that's got an anvil at the top? That's the first one we're aiming for."

"Oh, I see. It does look better than any of these. But why are we aiming for that one?"

"Didn't you hear us over the radio? It's got rotation already."

"Oh," she said, looking embarrassed. "I'm sorry! I'm just... there's just so much to see, and I haven't been paying attention to everything on the radio."

"It's all right," he said. He paused. It was pretty clear to him that she'd never been out of the woods before, but the way she acted about _everything_ was just unaccountable. He twisted a knob on his radio, muting the microphone on his side. He didn't want the guys to hear this conversation. "How often—well, let me rephrase. When was the last time you left that cabin anyway?"

She blushed hotly.

"Never mind," he muttered. "Don't worry about it."

"No," she said. "I've been keeping it from you all this time, but, Flynn—I've never been out of the cabin."

Tires squealed as he nearly swerved off the road. _"What?"_ he sputtered. "Never?"

She shook her head.

He gaped at her. "Why—sorry, why the hell _not?"_

"Mother always said that it was too dangerous outside and I needed to be in the cabin to be safe."

"Safe from what?"

"From everything." She turned aside to face the window, so she wouldn't have to look at him. "Wild animals, diseases, bad people. She said all people were bad. I don't believe her now."

He could not believe it. "Rapunzel, your mother is—you need to _stay _out. You don't need to go back there."

"I don't know," she muttered. "Part of me thinks that. But then, you were running into the swamp because of people who wanted to kill you."

"Yeah, some people _are_ bad," he said. "You just have to try to avoid the bad ones, or be able to defend yourself against them, and stick to the good ones."

"I think you're one of the good ones."

Now _he_ was embarrassed. He didn't know what to say to that. He didn't _feel _like a good person. After all, he was planning to steal her design idea, present it to his former bosses as his own, and take her back to that cabin—_no, that prison,_ he amended in thought. The fact that she'd _never _been out of it made him even more uncomfortable about this plan.

With a sigh, he turned the radio back on and heard music. Hook was blasting hard rock music through his quadraphonic speakers that he'd installed in the Barn Burner. He often provided the "soundtrack" for their chases when there was nothing much to discuss.

Flynn turned to Rapunzel with a grin. "I don't suppose you've ever heard music like this either."

"No." She smirked. "I think I like it."

When the song ended, Hook did not put another one on. They were almost at the supercell thunderstorm. Flynn pointed at it. "Look at that," he said.

"It's rotating," Rapunzel agreed. It was. There was clear churning rotation of the central updraft in the storm. A bolt of lightning shot to the ground, and thunder crackled through the air.

"That's called a mesocyclone."

"I've seen clouds look like that before. It's easier to see from high up, you know. I think it'll produce a tornado."

"It might," he said. He turned to her. "So, you didn't know what tornadoes were called, but you know all about patterns for severe weather and even built your own station. You also know what clouds look like before they put out tornadoes."

She nodded silently.

"Didn't your mother bring you books?"

"No," Rapunzel said very quietly. "There were a few in the house, but she never brought new ones in."

_Poor girl,_ he thought, then chastised himself. He was thinking such sympathetic thoughts an awful lot now. He needed to stop before this emotion got the better of him.

"Flynn," she said. "Over the radio earlier, I heard a couple of the team talking about an 'F2'-rated tornado that they had chased once. What does that mean?"

"It's the F-scale," he said. "Zero through five. F0 is very light damage, F1 is stuff like roof damage, and so on. F4 is when the entire building is knocked down."

"You said it was zero to five," she said. "What about F5?"

He looked at the road. "F4s knock down houses. You want explicit details of what an F5 can do?" His voice was suddenly cold and reserved.

"No," she said in a small voice. "I suppose not."

They were silent for a while before she spoke again. "Why is it called the F-scale?"

He broke into a smirk, which made her feel better; at least he was back to normal. "Oh, it's named for me," he said.

"_Really?"_ Her eyes were wide.

Then the radio crackled to life and voices broke in. "Don't listen to him, babe. He's full of crap," came the voice of Hook.

"You would know all about being full of crap," Flynn said. "Maybe I should tell her how you really got that hook?"

"That's blackmail."

"No it's not."

"The F-scale is named for a distinguished scientist from Japan," Vladimir cut in over the radio. "Ted Fujita."

"Wow," Rapunzel said. "I saw Japan in the atlas at home. That's really far away. Do weather people talk to each other all over the world, then?"

"Yup," said Hook.

"Wow," she said again in a softer voice. Then she turned to Flynn. "But was the rest of it true? About the scale, I mean?"

"That was true," said Bignose over the radio.

"Yeah, better mark it on the calendar that he told the truth about something," Vlad said.

Flynn looked genuinely indignant. "You guys are going to teach her not to believe a word I say," he complained.

"You say that like it's a bad thing, Rider," Hook muttered. Flynn just glared in outrage at the radio, unable to find words.

"Hey," Rapunzel said, sounding as if she had something very urgent to tell.

"Hey," Flynn said in reply. "Sorry about that."

"No, it's not that. I was just wondering if we were going to chase that tornado." She pointed out the window. A thin gray funnel had descended to the ground. It was churning in an empty field to their left.

"_Damn!" _Flynn exclaimed, swerving the car. He couldn't believe it. He'd _never, ever _missed a touchdown if it was in his line of sight. This was humiliating. But he didn't have time to think of that. He had to catch it. His thoughts raced. _Moore. Deployment. A job again._ He swerved at a right angle and took off down a dirt road that cut through the field, the unicorn truck and Barn Burner following him closely.

The funnel twisted through the field, turning brown as it churned up dirt. Flynn floored it, sending the needle on the speedometer up to 95 kph. Dust churned around them, and bits of gravel flew through the air. The other two kept their distance, not wanting their vehicles to get hit by rocks. Rapunzel laughed giddily as they approached the tornado.

It was going to be a short-lived one, Flynn could tell. Typical for early in an outbreak in the middle of the day. The real beasts were not likely to show up until late this evening. This twister was already starting to rope out, stretching and curving with a horizontal component. It wasn't going to be a good one to deploy Moore in after all. Oh, well. Better to wait for a strong one.

The tornado suddenly shifted its path, moving right in the direction of the vehicle. Flynn mentally cursed. He'd _known _that they did that when they were getting ready to dissipate. They usually shifted north when that happened. He'd seen it for a long time and was always prepared for it. Why hadn't he remembered it now?

"Uh, Flynn—"

"I know!" He tried to swerve the car around in a U-turn, but there was a steep embankment on both sides of the dirt road. The Mustang wouldn't climb it. He slammed on the brakes, shifted gears to reverse, and hit the gas again, trying to back out as fast as he could. The funnel continued to bear down on them. Bits of dirt and grass began to hit the side of the car. They were in the debris field.

"Get out of there, Rider!" came Bignose's voice over the radio. "Are you out of your mind?"

_Apparently,_ he thought, fighting the rotation of the wind as he continued trying to drive fast in reverse. Finally he realized that this was not going to work. The car was trapped in the circulation, and as the tornado roped out horizontally, he was _keeping _the car in its rotation by going in reverse. He slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a stop.

"Duck, Blondie!" he yelled, diving under the seat. She followed suit, curling protectively over the snake.

The funnel passed over. It wasn't very strong now, and it wasn't carrying anything except dirt and grass, so it couldn't do much to the car. Rapunzel peeked out the window to watch it. The wind howled as the funnel spent its energy, and then there was silence. Gingerly they emerged from the floor and peered out.

The tornado was gone. Flynn opened his door and stepped out, afraid of what kind of damage to his car that he might find. It was covered in broken grass blades and dirt, but otherwise it was undamaged. He heaved a sigh of relief and looked out. The van and the truck had pulled up behind his Mustang, and the guys had gotten out.

"That was amazing!" Attila said, clapping him on the back. "You're a crazy bastard, Rider, but that was _truly _an exploit of the Extreme."

"Yeah, and it was a total accident," he said ruefully.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I wasn't paying attention, or wasn't thinking, or something. I shouldn't have been that close to it. I know better."

"Oh, your thoughts were otherwise occupied, eh?" Bignose said teasingly.

Flynn glared at him.

"She seems to have had a good time," Attila remarked, pointing at Rapunzel.

She was dancing around in the field, giggling and letting out little squeals of joy. Flynn stared at her, amazed. He had been sure he was about to have his car totaled, and she just found the experience exciting. _She's a bigger thrill-seeker than I am,_ he thought.

Rapunzel danced over to the Barn Burner and took Hook's normal hand, to his evident surprise. She pulled him into her happy dance. Flynn did not like that sight at all and got out of his car—to do what, he wasn't sure, but he just felt like he had to put a stop to this.

"That was SO FUN!" she exclaimed, her eyes wide. She turned to Flynn. "Can we do that again? I want to see another one!"

"Yeah," he said reluctantly. "Just so you know, this is kind of an off day. This doesn't normally happen."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we normally try not to put the cars directly in the tornadoes' way. You don't know how strong they are, and we were fortunate that that one didn't flip the car or send it flying."

Her face fell. "But it was _fun," _she said petulantly. She turned to Hook. "I know! Yours is much bigger than his. Flynn's is kind of small. I'm sure yours could hold up to more. I'll just go with you!"

Hook nearly burst out laughing at the way she had phrased this, and Flynn's face contorted in annoyance, jealousy, and something else. Yes, there was that protectiveness again. She didn't realize the double entendre that she had just said. It wasn't right for these guys to laugh at her. _And it's not small,_ he thought angrily.

"I assure you," he snarled, "my Mustang will hold up _much _better than these other vehicles. The wind will get under them, blow against the sides, and flip them just like _that,_ and let me tell you something, Blondie. You do not want to be in a car that's rolling. It's not thrilling. It's just terrifying." He stormed over and grabbed her hand.

She glared at him. "Don't tell me what to do."

"I'm not. I'm just making _recommendations_. You want a good time? You want a thrilling chase? Keep out of that"—he pointed to the Barn Burner—"or that," he finished, pointing at Vladimir's unicorn truck. "There's a reason _they_ follow _me_. I'm the one known for doing extreme things. You want to see a tornado again? _I'll show you a tornado, _Blondie." He finally stopped speaking, only to realize that his heart was pounding and his chest was heaving.

She gave him a hard, calculating look, as if she knew exactly what was going through his mind.

Which she probably did. It was fairly obvious. The other guys were smirking at him. _Damn it,_ he thought. _You have got to get hold of yourself._

"All right," she said slyly. "You'd better make good on that."

"Oh, I assure you, I will."

* * *

><p><strong>Author's note<strong>: 95 kph = 60 mph. Too fast for a dirt road, really. But don't worry; worse is coming.


	7. The Metaphor of Chasing Tornadoes

**Author's note:** Back story and character development time! The title of this chapter is a reference to a quote from _Twister._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 7: The Metaphor of Chasing Tornadoes<strong>

* * *

><p>The three vehicles edged their way out of the field and approached the highway. Another vehicle was making its way up the road, so Flynn stopped to wait for it to pass before pulling out. As it approached, the team realized that it was the black truck that the Stabbingtons had been driving. Their rip-off instrument canister stood upright in the back of the truck. The vehicle slowed to a crawl and the window rolled down.<p>

The doors to the Barn Burner and the unicorn truck opened, and the burly chasers piled out, pointing and jeering. "Ha ha!" Hook said. "Who's the extreme loser now, suckers?"

"Yeah, were you trying to catch that tornado?" Bignose chortled. "It went that way—oh, oops, it's lifted now! Sucks to be you!"

"And the Extreme got a direct impact!" said Vladimir, gesturing to the dirt-covered Mustang. "Losers!"

The black truck stopped, and the two thugs got out. Edvard was holding a video camera. They both stared angrily at the gleeful chase team.

"Nice nose," Flynn called to Gudric as he got out of his car. He opened Rapunzel's door and brought her out, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her back against his chest. It wasn't a sign of affection for her, he told himself. It was just a way to demonstrate to the Stabbingtons that he was so awesome that he could turn up with a hot girl even after he was abducted and chased into a swamp. He felt her breath catch in her chest as he gripped her and tried not to think about that.

"You think this is it?" Gudric snarled. "We'll be the ones laughing this time tomorrow, Rider, because we're gonna get the deployment first." He turned to his brother. "That's all we need. Let's get the fuck out of here and leave these scum to their laughter." They stormed back into the truck, slammed the door, and drove off in fury.

Once they were gone, Rapunzel turned to Flynn. "Okay," she said with a contemplative frown, "I get that you and those guys_ really _don't like each other. They're the ones who tried to kill you, aren't they?" He nodded, and she continued. "Well, I was wondering _why._ Why the enmity?"

"You know that thing in the back of their truck? Take a look in Vlad's truck."

She glanced at the unicorn truck. "It looks like the same kind of thing."

"It is. They stole my design and got a company interested in it, telling them it was theirs. They have a contract, which is contingent on their device working today."

"But it's _your _design! That's got to be illegal!"

"Yeah, it is, but the lab doesn't really have the resources to fight a lawsuit against a wealthy corporation with lots of lawyers, which is what it would take if their contract got finalized. It's better if _we _deploy and set the record straight in the media. The company will probably renege on the contract then."

"So this has never been done before? Deploying something like that into a tornado?"

"Not directly."

"And we're trying to do it _today._ I'm going to be here for something _historic!_ Wow."

He grinned. "Yeah, wow."

"Hey, Rider," Hook called out. "Sorry to break up this cozy moment—"

"I was just _explaining_ to her about the Stabbingtons," Flynn objected hotly.

"Right," Hook said smugly. "Whatever ya say. The point is, we need to decide what we're going to do next."

The team then gathered together to plot their course. According to Flynn—and confirmed by the mobile radar—the storm that had produced the tornado was weakening and was not likely to put out another one. Flynn pulled out his cell phone and looked at long-range official radar. "Hey," he said, holding the phone out to the rest of the team, "there are some new storms out farther east that look good. Want to aim for one of these?"

Attila frowned. "They'll probably go over the water by the time we get there."

"It'll definitely be a close call," Hook agreed, "but you know what else is out that way, Attila?"

"The city? I would've thought you'd want to avoid that."

"Your mama."

"Hey, watch it—oh, yeah, I get it. Yeah, she's out there."

Flynn laughed at Attila's slowness on the uptake. "I don't know, guys. We probably shouldn't pile in on her." He didn't want to bring up the fact that he didn't like her cooking very much and liked _her_ even less.

"Well, unless anyone has a better idea for food," Bignose said.

"There's nothing out here but that sleazy motel, and the only food worth eating there is bar food," Hook said.

"Yeah, and there are some convenience stores around the other side of the swamp, but it won't be any better there," Bignose added.

"Exactly. I can't think of any better place to eat than Katrina's house," Hook said. "What do you think, Ulf?"

The strange silent chaser nodded in assent.

"Yeah, we know where Attila gets his cooking skills from," Vladimir said, thumping Attila on the back.

"So, we shoot for those cells, and then we head for Katrina's?" Hook said.

"Yup."

* * *

><p>As they headed east, Rapunzel was gradually coming down from her adrenaline high. Instead she wanted to discuss her bizarre past. It was as if after revealing her big secret—that she had never left her cabin—she needed to explain the rest of it.<p>

Flynn found that he did not really want to hear it. He was acutely aware now of the scene that he had put on for the other chasers before the Stabbingtons turned up, as well as what it implied, and it set his nerves on edge to think about it. If the concept of having male friends he could depend on frightened him, the thought of a girlfriend left him reeling in terror. He didn't want to feel anything for her. He tried to focus instead on the box of weather sensors in his trunk, and what that would mean for his future. He wanted the lab. He wanted to run this place that dedicated itself to the study of severe weather, because the symbolism of that was so appealing to him. Mastery of the weather. It was the only way he figured he could ever make peace with his past. And the first step now was getting back in the lab. A country girl who lived with a crazy mother had no part in that. Her _idea _did, but that was it. He'd use it and be done with her. He had to think this way. Besides, Rapunzel wasn't interested in him either. She was only interested in getting a rush out of nature and seeing something that she'd been dreaming about for years. He was just a tool she was using for that purpose. She'd been more than ready to ditch him back at the field when she thought he was going to wimp out. He was no more to her than she was to him. _She _isn't _anything else to me, damn it,_ he thought. He tried to ignore the way her breath had caught when he held her.

It was difficult to think this way, however, when Rapunzel was pouring out her heart to him. As Flynn has guessed back at the cabin, the craziness ran deep, and the more he heard of this, the more compassion he felt for her. He was also pretty sure that there was now a bit more than just compassion and sympathy.

"She makes me sing for her every day," Rapunzel was saying, staring at him with wide green eyes. "Is that normal?"

"No," he said automatically. "It's not."

"I didn't think it was," she muttered. "And another thing. You know the medicine I gave you?"

"Yeah. That was good stuff."

She grinned. "It is good stuff. It seems to heal pretty much everything. And I make it. There is this one houseplant that makes big yellow flowers, and I make it out of them. It's funny, though. It changes my hair."

"Yeah, I was wondering about that," he said. "I assume it's never been cut?"

"Not properly cut, no. I keep the ends trimmed so they're even."

"Why is it that long? Or should I even ask?"

"She likes it this way."

"Ugh. Why does that not surprise me?" He paused, then reconsidered. "Do _you _like it that way?"

She bit her lip. "Well, I can't imagine how else it could look," she said. "At least in terms of its length. What I was going to say, though, was that this medicine I make... it changes my hair color."

"How so?" This was freaking him out. What _was _the stuff made of?

"It's actually supposed to be a kind of rich brown."

"Huh. I think you'd look cute that way. I've got a thing for brunettes," he said with a wink, then mentally cursed himself. _Why did I say that?_

She smiled. "Well, then, maybe my next act of rebellion will be to cut off my hair and let it grow out brown."

He chuckled. "You know, you _can _dye it if you ever want a change—or if you want to grow it out in its natural shade but don't want to shave your head."

She smiled again. Those smiles sure were making him uncomfortable. Originally, they weren't flirtatious, but now they kind of were. This was _really _not good. Flynn cleared his throat and grasped for something else to say. "So, I assume your mother takes this medicine too and also has long blonde hair."

Rapunzel frowned. "No, it doesn't do the same thing to her hair. Well, she cuts it, but her natural hair color is gray, and the medicine turns it black, for some reason."

"That's strange."

She shrugged.

"I wish you knew what the plant was. I've never heard of a flower like that. Not that I'm an expert on botany," he said. "But I would've thought that the drug industry would've leaped on it by now, since it has the ability to heal just about anything. I mean, you could really make a pot of money with this medicine."

Rapunzel froze. "That's what Mother always said," she muttered. "She said that the flower is one of a kind, a fortunate mutation, and the formula can't be duplicated with a machine. That it requires a human touch and a very precise hand to make it."

"There you go. She could make a ton of money off that. I'd do it."

Rapunzel shuddered. "She tried. Before I was born, she used to live in a city on an island, and she had a greenhouse full of them. This one company approached her with a deal where they would manufacture the medicine and grow the plants, and she'd get paid for having first bred them and discovered the formula. The first customers were this couple that had something wrong with—well—they were infertile," she said, blushing. "And the company tried to manufacture the medicine, but they couldn't do it, so they told Mother to mix it up for them. And she did, but the company tried to get out of paying her. So she destroyed the entire greenhouse except one plant, and took me—I was a little baby then—and fled to the swamp where they couldn't find us."

A really bad feeling was coming over Flynn. "Was this company, by any chance, named Crown Enterprises?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"I bet it was. They do that kind of thing. They're the ones funding the Stabbingtons. Now, I wouldn't feel sorry for _them_ if Crown stole an idea that was truly theirs, but that canister of instruments was _my _idea_._ But yeah, Crown has a bit of a reputation for trying to rip off inventors." _Just like you're going to do to her,_ a little voice in his head scolded, but he tried to push that thought aside.

They lapsed into silence for a while before Flynn spoke again. "What happened to your father?" he asked, as gently as he could manage.

"I don't know. She never mentions him."

He didn't press the subject. Apparently something tragic had happened to the father, and he could definitely understand not ever talking about tragic losses. But something else was bothering him.

"I can understand her destroying the plants to get away from Crown. But taking _you,_ running into the swamp, and going out _herself _but never letting _you _out is just strange. You're not the one Crown would be interested in. Maybe they could sue _her, _if she'd signed the rights to the flowers over to them, but they couldn't do anything to _you."_

"That's never made sense to me either," Rapunzel said in a hushed voice, as if she were admitting to something naughty.

"And either way, I think it's about damn time an inventor counter-sued them. The only reason they're allowed to exist still is because they fund a lot of political campaigns. Corona is corrupt from the top down." _Listen to yourself,_ he chided himself. _Since when do you care about things like this?_ He had a vague memory of there being some character in a bar two nights ago, when he was so drunk, who was about to beat him up for being politically apathetic. That's how he'd always been. He was focused on _numero uno_ and everyone else could go to hell. _Since when did I start to care about anything else, especially some insanely paranoid swamp-dwelling plant breeder that I don't even know?_

_It's because of her,_ he thought, his stomach twisting. _Get hold of yourself, Rider._

He couldn't let himself think this way. This was crazy. He had been terrified of committing himself emotionally to _anyone _after his family had died. That was why, after chasing with them for years, he didn't know his team members' real names. How could he _think_ of making a commitment to a girl who had to be damaged in ways he could not even begin to understand? She needed help, and he certainly wasn't in a position to help anyone. He needed too much help himself.

_She doesn't need as much help as you think,_ a voice in his head whispered. _She just has a lot of facts and customs to learn. She's much better adjusted than you are. She takes joy in life. She thinks for herself. She's sweet and smart and maybe _she's_ the help _you_ need._

As if to distract himself from his own thoughts, Flynn suddenly hit the accelerator. The car lurched forward at 130, and Rapunzel let out a cute little yelp of pleasure as she was thrown back in her seat. As she quickly became accustomed to the new speed, she grinned from ear to ear at him, and this smile was _definitely _flirtatious. It made him feel warm all over. Great, just great. Confirmation of what he was thinking. He really did not want to acknowledge that this little voice—which was becoming more and more outspoken—could be correct.

Instead he turned to her with a smirk. "Like that?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Well, if that's the best you can do, it'll work, I guess."

He knew what she was doing, and he knew that he should not fall for it, but he could not help himself. "Oh, that's _definitely_ not the best I can do," he said. "You want fast? You'll get fast." He hit the gas and took it up to 140.

Static crackled over the radio, followed by Vladimir's voice. "What's the rush?"

"She wanted to go faster," he replied.

"Hey, Blondie," Vladimir said over the radio. "Rider's crazy enough without being egged on. And if he gets too many more speeding tickets, he won't be able to pay for his car insurance." The other chasers chuckled over the radio.

Rapunzel turned to Flynn. "Is that true?"

"I've had a couple of tickets," he said evasively.

She sighed. "I don't want to be responsible for you getting another. You can take it back down. I'm impressed." She smirked flirtatiously again.

"Hey," came the voice of Bignose over the radio, "I was looking at the radar. I think we ought to aim for the southernmost cell. It's about five minutes away and it's looking good."

Flynn reached into his satchel and pulled out his phone. With one hand, he navigated to his live radar app. He raised an eyebrow. "Not bad," he muttered. He held the phone out to Rapunzel. "Here. I don't suppose you've had much experience with radar. _This _is what a tornadic thunderstorm looks like in a cross-section."

She took the phone and studied the radar. "I assume the tornado is down there," she said, pointing at the curling hook echo in the southwest part of the storm.

"If there is one, yes."

She beamed at him. Her face was absolutely radiant, and he couldn't stand it. He simply could not deal with the effect that her smiles were having on him, and he resolved to do something about it. _Enough is enough,_ he told himself. _This is out of hand, and it's going to end here and now. I'll scare her off. She doesn't know anything about what they can really do and how dangerous they can be. If she thinks they're all like that little spinner in the field, she's about to learn differently._ He looked at the storm on radar. If it had a tornado with it, it was probably moderately strong. He had driven pretty close to some strong ones. It was a delicate situation, but he was confident in his abilities.

They were very close to the coastline now. The road paralleled the waterfront, giving them a view of the marina and the tourist-trap restaurants that had sprung up around it. The island of Corona, with its historic foot bridge and modern suspension bridge for vehicular traffic, was off in the distance to their left. The supercell was coming into view, and they had a direct route toward the wall cloud, approaching it from the west. Rapunzel went silent, staring at the towering, churning cloud. Lightning bolts crackled every second. Beyond the swirling wall cloud, a curtain of rain darkened the horizon.

"Look!" Rapunzel suddenly cried, pointing at a funnel off to the right. It was still over land, but it—and the parent cloud—were headed straight for the waterfront.

"There's no point! You can't get there in time!" Hook called over the radio.

"Watch me," he said. Tires squealed and the engine roared. Rapunzel watched the speedometer as it hit 130 again... 135... 140... finally 150.

"Flynn, you really are nuts!" she exclaimed as he swerved around the traffic. Most of the cars were across the median on the other side of the road, getting out of the way of the tornado, but some were apparently headed for the city. Flynn passed all of them. Several drivers flipped him off as he flew around them and cut in. He returned the gesture.

The tornado shifted its path to the south and seemed to intensify as it did. No longer aiming for the ocean front, it was suddenly headed for a recreational lake to their right, which seemed to be associated with a petting zoo and small theme park. Flynn cut into the right lane to have a ready exit. Rapunzel gasped and gripped the sides of her seat, her eyes bugged out.

An eighteen-wheeled truck suddenly loomed ahead of them. The passing lane was completely blocked by traffic. Rapunzel started to scream as they approached it. There was no way he could brake in time. She closed her eyes and prepared for the impact.

Then she heard the rattle of dirt and gravel. She opened her eyes. _Flynn was passing the truck on the shoulder._

"Rider, you fucking idiot!" Vladimir called over the radio. "What are you trying to do? You can't deploy! We've got Moore and there is no way we'll get there!"

"Shut up," he said, turning the radio off. He kept going on the shoulder, slowing down as he did; there was a road leading across the lake that he was aiming for. Rapunzel screamed again as he swerved at a right angle and got on the lake road.

"What _are_ you trying to do?" she shouted. She sounded angry. _Good,_ he thought.

"You wanted to see another tornado," he said through clenched teeth. "You're about to."

"You're insane!" she shouted.

He ignored this and headed onto the four-laned bridge that cut across the recreational lake. The tornado was now directly over the lake, to their left; it was considerably wider than the first one, and it was still shifting its path more or less south.

He switched the radio back on. The other chasers were ranting and swearing about what he had done, concerned about him since they could not see him now. He decided to say something. "Knock it off, guys! I'm on the bridge over the lake," he called.

"What are you doing out there?" one of them—it sounded like Attila—snarled.

"I'm showing Blondie a waterspout up close and personal," he said with a mean-spirited leer at her. The car swerved as he took his eyes away from the road.

Her face twisted at the look he was giving her. "Flynn, get out of here _now!_ It's going to go right over us!" she said.

He looked. The waterspout was not moving in a straight path. It was twisting and sidewinding in circular motions. His stomach tightened. He'd been so focused on scaring her that he had not been paying attention to the storm.

"I don't like this!" Rapunzel cried. She gripped the seat, digging her fingernails into it. "Flynn, it's getting closer!" She stared out the window, transfixed, as the waterspout approached.

Suddenly the car swerved out of control. The road was slick! It was empty of traffic, most people being sane enough to stay off it while a tornado was out there, but that wasn't going to do them any good if they slammed into the bridge.

"Damn!" Flynn shouted, trying to get control of his car. The tires squealed. He spun around twice before coming to a halt in the middle of the road. The waterspout was upon them, carrying debris from the petting zoo and lake, and there was nowhere for them to go.

A fish slammed into the front windshield. It left a smear of blood and slime across the window. Rapunzel cried out in disgust. Then she saw something else, something larger.

"Is that a _cow?"_ she said in horror.

It was. A black-and-white cow was hurtling through the sodden air, mooing in terror. The wind carrying the animal was horizontal. The very air was visible from the moisture it held, and they suddenly realized—

"We're in the circulation," Flynn said, suddenly awed into quietness. His eyes were wide.

The waterspout passed over them, spinning the car around and around, coating it with thousands of gallons of water. It looked like they were underwater. Water seeped through the windows as the low pressure of the tornado opened tiny cracks between the glass and the doors. The car became very humid inside and took on a musty smell. Rapunzel whimpered all the while, terrified that the storm would send them into—or _over_—the bridge, but it just spun them in place, occasionally picking up one end and dropping it.

Finally the spinning and rattling stopped. Rapunzel was breathing heavily, her eyes wide, her face deathly white. Neither of them could say anything for a moment.

Then she turned to Flynn with a look that sent ice through his heart. Her face was contorted in fury—and betrayal. "Why did you do that?" she shouted. "You almost got both of us killed!"

He couldn't think of any excuse to give. He just stared, shame washing over him.

"I heard what they were saying on the radio! You didn't have anything to deploy and I know it! So why'd you do it? Were you just trying to scare me?"

He couldn't respond. It was horrifying how readily she had latched on to the truth of the matter. _You know, you're a real dick,_ his conscience scolded him.

Wait, conscience?

_Yup, Eugene, conscience,_ he thought. _You should be ashamed. You did almost get her killed trying to play badass and scare her, all because you're afraid of your own emotions._

"Rapunzel, I—I didn't mean for that to go like that," he said feebly.

She glared at him. "I don't believe you! I think you did want it to be like that! You wanted to frighten me, didn't you?"

He stared at her, speechless. She read the truth in his eyes, and her face crumpled. "I get it," she said, her voice starting to break. "I understand. Look, Flynn, I know I'm kind of strange, and I don't really know anything about how the world works. I'm sorry for imposing on you. I know you have important things to do, with your instruments and everything, and don't have time to take somebody like me on a tour. I'll just... go back home after this, all right?"

"No," he said. "No, don't do that. I'm sorry. It's nothing to do with not having time for you. It really isn't. You're not in the way at all. This is all my problem, not you, and I... I'm sorry, Rapunzel."

She looked up at him and met his eyes. "Do you want me here or not, Flynn?" she asked evenly. "All I want is the truth, whatever it is."

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked directly into her eyes. "Yes," he said. "I want you here. I really do. I... like you."

_Sucker,_ one part of him, the part that had wanted this reckless, insanely dangerous trip into a waterspout, thought.

Then the other part spoke: _Oh, shut up, "Flynn." It's not like your advice has been worth a damn._

He sighed, running his fingers through his hair to try to calm his thoughts. It _really_ wasn't good when he was arguing with himself, even in his own mind. He needed to find a point of focus, and for some reason—_yeah, right, "some reason,"_ that second voice teased—he was immediately drawn to one in particular. He turned to Rapunzel. She was relaxed again, breathing normally, looking down at her lap. Her eyes were shining again. Tentatively he reached out and stroked her cheek very lightly.

She flipped her head around, eyes wide. He backed away, afraid that he had offended or otherwise upset her. "No, it's all right," she said. "I just didn't expect that." She looked into his eyes again. "You really like me?"

"Yes, I really like you." _There, that wasn't so bad, was it?_

She grinned, apparently back to normal. "Good! Because I like you too." And before he could even process what was happening, she leaned over and pecked him on the cheek.

His eyes popped. Quickly, almost instinctively, he turned around to take control of it, but she was too fast. She immediately drew away and sat straight in her seat again, looking, somehow, both smug and innocent at the same time as she stared straight ahead. "Now, how about some lunch?" she said.

* * *

><p><strong>Note:<strong> All speeds are given in kilometers per hour out of respect for this story supposedly being set in Europe (which, incidentally, DOES get tornadoes, including Germany).

Next chapter is about Gothel and the Stabbingtons, and it is rather shorter than this one (this chapter kept getting longer and longer) as well as much darker than anything in this story so far. This fic is not going to stay light and fluffy—well, minus chapter three—for much longer.


	8. Unholy Alliance

**Note:** I apologize for the ugliness of this chapter. I have thought for some time that Gothel making a deal with the Stabbingtons to supposedly sell Rapunzel into slavery was one of the ugliest things, bar none, in any Disney movie, because of the unspoken subtext of rape and sexual slavery. I'm just taking that and making it explicit rather than subtext. I've also taken out any pretense that Gothel cared for her and made her into an even more hardened villain than in the movie, even though I've given her a somewhat sympathetic past. People are responsible for their own actions whatever their past may be, in my opinion.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 8: Unholy Alliance<strong>

* * *

><p>Gothel sipped her tea in the little diner. She was always nervous going on these trips, but somebody had to do it, and she didn't trust the girl. The way she'd been talking lately made Gothel very uneasy. "Stir-crazy," she supposed it was called. Rapunzel always wanted to get out and see this dangerous weather, like what was happening today. Gothel knew better than to suppose that it had anything to do with who her birth parents were; environmental conditioning went a <em>very <em>long way, but she wondered in retrospect if it had been the best idea to build a treehouse that gave Rapunzel a perfect view of the sky. If that were what she was exposed to constantly, that would be what she would develop an interest in. It happened every spring, when the bad weather started appearing, and off and on during the other months, but it seemed worse than usual this year. Rapunzel was going on like a well-shaken bottle about to explode. If this kept up much longer, Gothel would have to drug her to keep her from disobeying—and _not _with her herbal elixir. Gothel had a whole cookbook of drug recipes and a rather extensive knowledge of plants. She also knew what streets in the city had a flourishing trade in illegal prescription drugs, if it came down to it. She didn't really want to do it, but like a liar who told more and more lies to cover up the first one, she would do whatever was necessary to keep her secret.

For not the first time, she almost regretted taking her as a baby. It was an act of revenge and not that well-thought-out. In her opinion, it was because of that baby that she had to destroy most of her plants—her real true love—and flee the city. Crown Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of the corrupt parent corporation, had approached her with an offer that seemed too good to be true. It was. She thought she would be a multimillionaire if she accepted. Instead she ended up as a slave forced to make her own medicine formula for that damn couple of elite scientists while fighting a losing battle against the Crown corporate lawyers for her well-deserved royalties. When she left the city, she was not going quietly into the night. Oh no. She was going to take vengeance. She was going to take the baby. After all, it _was _kind of hers, in a way. If not for her formula, it wouldn't have been conceived. It owed its existence to her.

But she knew that she would be the top suspect, and she knew that she had to go someplace where she wouldn't ever be found—_or_ the girl. That meant the swamp. It meant living completely off the grid. No utility bills, no phone or Internet, no credit cards, no steady job. It meant pawning off homemade baskets and furniture at street markets near the marina for petty cash. And it meant heavy usage of the medicine. She was already looking older when her visage appeared on police composites eighteen years ago, so she _had_ to look younger now. Fortunately, anti-aging appeared to be one of the properties of the medicine. She supposed that the flower must be full of anti-oxidants. It had to be something like that.

Her musings were interrupted by the loud and obnoxious dinging of the electronic bell. Somebody had entered the diner. Gothel turned around to look and sniffed in contempt as she saw the appearance of the new patrons. They were big, ugly, thuggish men. One of them had a broken nose. The other had an untreated cut on his arm, which looked infected. They probably got into bar fights all the time. Disgusting. She felt in her pocket for her switchblade that she always carried with her. Hopefully these thugs wouldn't try anything in a public place, but it was always best to be prepared.

"Hey, look," one of the thugs said, pointing at the television. "It's us. Didn't expect 'em to air it this early." The other one chuckled.

Gothel assumed that they must be referring to mugshots or something to do with crime and the police. She was astonished when she heard what was being said on the broadcast.

"Good afternoon, this is WCRN, and today the big story is the severe weather we're expecting. On that note, we have with us today the developers of the MR2, Edvard and Gudric Stabbington. Thanks for being here, guys. Can you tell a little bit about what the MR2 _does?"_

Onscreen, Edvard grinned. It looked like a leer. "Yup, it's a set of instruments that we are gonna deploy into the path of a tornado later on today."

"We're gonna get wind, temperature, humidity, pressure, all sorts of data," Gudric added.

"And what will that achieve?" the reporter asked.

"Well, it ain't ever been done before. There've been some near misses, sure. But we're thinking that if we can get actual data out of the tornado itself, it'll mean a lot for future forecasting and understanding them."

"And will that have an effect on warnings?"

"Yup," Edward agreed. "It oughta. Once people understand better what's going on inside of a tornado, it'll be easier to avoid _unfortunate accidents_ like what happened to some of our former work colleagues earlier today." He and Gudric chuckled—not onscreen—but in person in the diner, which Gothel noted.

At that, the news station broadcast a silent clip of a prairie with a dirt road cutting through the middle of it. Three vehicles were parked out there: a hail-damaged, radar-topped van painted with the inscription "Barn Burner," a truck with an obvious custom paint job of armored unicorns, and a white Mustang that was absolutely coated with blades of grass, dust, and dirt. Apparently the car had taken a direct hit from a tornado—a weak one, undoubtedly, if it didn't have any more damage than that. Five large, burly men were standing outside the van and truck. Then the doors to the Mustang opened and out stepped a leaner, but much more handsome man, and a woman. A woman with long blonde hair.

"Rapunzel!" Gothel hissed under her breath. Her eyes narrowed as the man on the TV screen smirked, _wrapped his arm around Rapunzel's waist,_ and made some comment that the news station had muted. Gothel could not believe it. That was, without any doubt, Rapunzel. She'd run off and joined this little band of storm chasers, and was letting one of them—probably all of them, Gothel thought—feel her up, or most likely more, in exchange for seeing tornadoes. Gothel was sure of it. It wasn't like she had anything else to offer them. "The little whore!" she snarled.

The thugs—the Stabbingtons, she remembered—turned around at the sound. "Eh?" one of them, the one with the broken nose, said.

She glared at them.

"You know that bitch?" the other one asked.

Gothel quickly considered her options. They had said _"former_ colleagues" in the interview, and that little snippet was very clearly a gloat. It was probably muted because the storm chasers that Rapunzel was with had cursed at the Stabbingtons. There was undoubtedly some enmity here. She could use that. "Yes, I know her," she said. "She's a disobedient foster child. I told her not to leave the house today, and look what she did anyway. Nothing but trouble since I took her in. You know how foster kids can be. You just never know what you're going to get."

The Stabbingtons chuckled.

"And apparently she's decided to be a whore for those men if they take her on a thrill ride," Gothel continued.

"Well, that explains it," the one with the broken nose—Gudric—said. "We couldn't figure out how on earth Rider managed to pick up a good-looking girl in the middle of nowhere."

"You don't like him?"

"Hell no," said the other one, Edvard. "He hit my brother in the nose and cut my arm open."

"Why?"

They leaned in. "You didn't hear this, but it was because we borrowed some notes of his for our instruments."

Well, that explained something that had been nagging at Gothel since the broadcast finished. These guys did not seem like the sharpest knives in the drawer, and it was amazing to her that they could have developed a scientific instrument package. The man on the television was clearly a prick, but he at least looked clever. Gothel had a sneaking suspicion that it was not an accident that his car had been in the path of the tornado. It was probably deliberate, and Rapunzel may well have goaded him into doing it. Either way, he knew enough about it to get himself into the path.

"Ah," she said, smirking. "I see. Well, since you don't like _them,_ and I have a bit of a problem of my own with the girl, how about you and I make a deal." Her voice was very low.

They grinned evilly at each other. "Yeah? What sort of a deal?" Gudric asked softly.

"You've got a truck, I see. Why don't you follow that group? I assume you intend to anyway."

"Yeah."

"I don't care what your business is with the others, but the girl needs to be taught a good lesson, and I think a pair of big burly scary men would be just the ticket."

"What are you saying you want us to do?"

"Use your imaginations," Gothel said. "I assume you've got some. And nothing permanent, please," she added. "Just... show her what happens when girls decide to whore themselves out."

"Is this a set-up?" Edvard asked suspiciously. "Are you undercover police?"

"No, and as far as I'm aware, there's no law against frightening people," she snapped.

"Oh. _Frightening_ people," Gudric said with an evil leer. "I get it."

"Yes. And another thing. I came out here on foot."

"You need a ride?"

She pulled out her switchblade and gave them a meaningful look. "Yes, I need a ride. You're following them, right? I am going along."

"No problem," Edvard said quickly.

* * *

><p><strong>Note:<strong> This will probably be the last chapter for a number of days, because I'm going on vacation and chapter 9 is not quite finished yet, maybe 2/3 written.


	9. Lunch At Katrina's

**Author's Note:**

So I'm back from a very nice spring break on a warm and sunny island, tanned, rested, alone, and surrounded by enormous piles of... alas... work to do. Such are the joys of finishing a meteorology thesis. However, I always make time for doing fun things (highly recommended for everyone, BTW), so here's chapter 9.

Now, one, some references (particularly revolving around the OC Katrina) are probably in poor taste, but I couldn't help it. In _this _story, I had to name the mother of a thug after a real thug of a hurricane. Two, a certain scene here is taken almost directly from _Twister,_ because it never fails to make me laugh. Three, I'm not overly happy with this chapter; it seems like filler, but I suppose there is additional character development. I can't really justify cutting it out, not just because I'm following the outline of _Twister,_ but also because there need to be some slow chapters between the action sequences. Chapter 10 will have things happening again. And four, I may lower the rating of this story to T (if I can get away with it) because of a change I made to the outline of chapter 11. It'll be very obvious what was changed when I post that chapter. If I do change the rating, it will NOT mean a change of any existing content.

Penguinator27: Thanks for the kind comment! I hope this chapter doesn't disappoint... but it probably will. The next chapters are better (at least in outline).

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><p><strong>Chapter 9: Lunch at Katrina's<strong>

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><p>By the time the Mustang got back on the freeway, the other storms had moved out to sea. When Flynn got back on the radio with the rest of the team, he explained his behavior as having "temporarily lost his senses." They didn't question this. That did not make him happy, but he knew he had painted himself into a corner this time and there <em>was <em>no good reason to go tearing down the road like a maniac, making illegal passes, and driving right into a strong waterspout. Fortunately for him, they preferred to discuss lunch. They were heading to the waterfront home of Attila's mother, Katrina. Rapunzel seemed happy to converse with them about her, asking questions about the type of food that she cooked and what she was like. She seemed particularly concerned about whether she could bring her python into the house, and Attila assured her that his mother would be delighted. Flynn was relieved that she had something else to occupy her thoughts, because he needed to think.

His thoughts were focused in particular on the cardboard box in the trunk of his car. Originally, he had intended to stay on the road chasing tornadoes into the night, dropping her off at her home and rushing back to the lab the next day with the box of sensors. The long-lasting outbreak would give him an excuse not to bring her by the laboratory before returning her to her cabin. Now he felt bad about completely ripping her off and then ditching her. He contemplated the possibility of taking her to the lab with him after all, but immediately found himself resisting that idea.

_I can't take her by the lab, though,_ he thought. _If I do, she'll discover that I don't work there anymore. She'll realize I lied about having a job and lied about still being involved with the Moore project, and it will be obvious to her what my interest was in the sensors. The Koenigs will also realize what I was up to, and that will be the end of both hopes. It doesn't matter if I do like her. I can't keep her as a friend, or anything else, if I take her to the lab. The only way I can keep a relationship with her is if I get a job there again. I'll have to take her by the cabin first after all._

It was all right taking her back to that place, Flynn told himself. She _was _legally old enough to leave home. He could probably persuade her to leave, if not now, then later, when he visited her again. Maybe he wouldn't even need her sensors to get his job back. His original intention, before he had known that she had them, was to have a successful deployment of Moore into a tornado. That might really do the trick. He considered refusing Rapunzel's offer of sensors altogether, at least until he got his job back, but again recoiled from that thought. It was better to have them in reserve as a backup plan. It was _always _better to have a backup plan. He'd just have to convince her to part with them without going by the laboratory herself.

He sighed in frustration. He wasn't going to fight the fact that he had developed feelings of some sort for Rapunzel. That wasn't going to work anyway, and he recognized it now. "Feelings" did not automatically imply anything dangerous, at any rate; they could always just be friends. He decided that he _was _okay with having friends. He also wasn't going to deviate from his original plan; that plan was the only way that he stood a chance of getting this job back _or _keeping her friendship. So why did he still feel guilty about it?

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><p>The chaser caravan rolled down the street paralleling the coast. Like the rest of the single-family residences on this drive, Katrina's house was built on stilts like Rapunzel's cabin, but it was not fifty feet off the ground. It was a regular waterfront home, raised off the ground to protect it from flooding. It had a long veranda wrapping around all sides and a little gazebo attached to one corner. As the three vehicles pulled into her driveway, Katrina came out of the house to greet them.<p>

She was a big woman with long wavy salt-and-pepper hair, built like a female bodybuilder, and she was almost as tall as Attila. She greeted the chasers in tattered jeans and a big blue shirt with what looked like a spiky little white wheel with a hole in the middle.

Rapunzel turned to Flynn to ask the question, but he expected it. "There's this one guy at the lab, goes by the nickname of Killer for reasons I don't quite understand, and he tie-dyes and screenprints T-shirts. He made that one for her."

"Oh. He's not with this group?"

"He doesn't chase."

"Did he make you a T-shirt?"

"Yup. It says 'The Extreme.'"

She glanced skeptically at him, but his expression did bear the appearance of honesty. Then she recalled that several of the guys had referred to him by that nickname today. She wondered what it meant. Surely he didn't drive into tornadoes deliberately all the time. He'd even said that this did not normally happen. She resolved to try to remember to ask him about it after they had eaten.

Rapunzel had instantly decided to help Katrina once she learned from the chasers that the older woman liked to cook. Rapunzel liked cooking too, and she had never tried any of the recipes that Katrina liked to prepare. Shrimp gumbo, alligator fillet, fried catfish, something called a "beignet"—Rapunzel was very intrigued by these concoctions and decided to learn how to make them.

She enjoyed trying out the unfamiliar ingredients, and Katrina was very happy to have a new student. She treated Rapunzel kindly and they got along well, but Rapunzel soon started to feel as if she were invisible to everyone there. As the two women worked on the food, the big chasers knocked around the open-plan house boisterously, exchanging anecdotes and teasing Katrina. She gave it back in kind. She was brash and loud, more than able to hold her own amidst a group of big, noisy guys. Rapunzel realized why, at least, she felt invisible to _Katrina;_ it was because she was talented enough in the kitchen not to require constant supervision and wasn't making a pest of herself to the woman as the big guys were. And she didn't expect to be paid extra attention by the big burly storm chasers; they hadn't really shared much conversation. So why was she feeling irritated about being ignored? Where was Flynn, anyway? That was what was pissing her off, and she knew it.

All of a sudden Katrina spoke up. "Ah, Rider, I see you're interested in my snow globe," she said in a very loud voice.

Flynn looked startled. As Rapunzel glanced at him, she noticed that he quickly closed the flap of his satchel with one hand while handling the knickknack with the other. She pursed her lips. So that's what he had been up to instead of talking to her. She wondered what he _had _managed to swipe when no one was looking.

"Oh," Flynn said, "right. It's not really a snow globe, though."

"No," Katrina agreed with a smirk, as if she knew exactly what he had been trying to do. "It shows the floating lanterns."

"The what?" Rapunzel asked. She walked over and peered at the object. It showed the island of Corona with the city and the castle. Flynn shook it, and box-shaped confetti with tiny designs painted on them swished around in the fluid.

"Oh, it was this thing Corona used to do," Katrina said. "They'd light paper lanterns and send them up into the sky."

"Why?"

"National holiday."

Rapunzel frowned. "Into the sky? How is that even _possible?"_

"Thermodynamics," Flynn said, setting down the snow globe with a glare at Katrina. "Works like a hot-air balloon. But they don't do it anymore after the old castle caught fire."

Rapunzel looked concerned. "Nobody lives there, do they?"

"No, it's an historic site," Katrina said. "An historic _ruin _now."

They went back to work, both women keeping sharp eyes on Flynn, and soon the food was ready. They had prepared a pot of gumbo and a side of rolls. The table was set for nine. To Rapunzel's delight, Katrina had set up a chair for Pascal next to hers. She was going to feed the snake while they ate. Flynn was in part disgusted at the thought, but he also had to admit to a kind of morbid curiosity to see how this would go.

He didn't generally like Katrina's cooking. It was too fishy and the spices were over the top, in his opinion. However, this time, the smell was different. It was much more appetizing. He wondered what changes Rapunzel had made to the recipes.

They began to eat. Sure enough, it _was _good. Flynn's eyes popped open in surprise when he took a bite of the gumbo. _Okay, this is really good,_ he thought, taking another—and another. He turned to Rapunzel, who was seated next to him, and grinned at her. She was feeding a shrimp to the snake, and as she met his eyes and grinned back at him, Pascal bit into the shrimp and took it right out of her fingers. She laughed.

"Well, guys," Katrina announced, gesturing across the table at Rapunzel, "I think this woman beat me."

They all looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Thanks, Mother," Attila said wryly. "You've gone and said something that we can't contradict _or_ agree with, because either way, we've insulted a woman's cooking."

"Oh please," Katrina scoffed, "I know it's true, and so do y'all. I never get offended by the truth."

They continued to eat. After most of the team had eaten three bowls, they were starting to feel bloated and to slow down. Katrina took this opportunity to start a conversation. "You know, if you'd managed to get out here a bit earlier, you could've seen your old friends on TV," she said with a devilish grin.

"What do you mean?" asked Attila. "The Stabbingtons? They aren't anyone here's friends."

"I know, son," she said, rolling her eyes. "It's called sarcasm."

"What were they doing on TV?"

Flynn suddenly had a bad feeling about this. "They had a video camera when we saw them in that field," he said.

"Yeah, it must've been from that," Katrina said. "They got on TV and talked about that big tin in the back of their truck—I know it wasn't theirs."

"Yeah, it was my idea," said Flynn.

"They said it'd be good if they could deploy it, because it would help people understand what went on inside the tornadoes better and maybe avoid—you're gonna love this—accidents like what happened to y'all earlier in the day."

"_What?"_ Flynn roared.

"Yeah, and there was footage from the field of your car all covered in dirt and grass."

"That wasn't anything to do with not understanding how they work! That was all me. I put myself in the path."

"I don't doubt _that _for one second," Katrina said with a laugh. "I'm just saying what was on TV."

"Sons of bitches," Hook said in disgust.

"Yeah, what a bunch of shit," Vladimir grumbled.

"They'll regret it," Attila said.

"Yup, they will rue the day they went up against the Extreme," said Bignose, clapping Flynn on the back. He downed another swig of Katrina's iced tea.

Rapunzel, who had been eating as daintily as she could manage in this rowdy crew, finally spoke up. "You know, I've been hearing that a lot today. Why is Flynn called 'the Extreme'?" she asked.

"You got to _ask_ that after riding with him?" Vladimir asked around a mouthful of bread.

"Okay," she said with a laugh, "but I mean, he always does these kinds of things?"

"You know, you don't have to talk about me as if I'm not here," Flynn said edgily, but Rapunzel only made eyes at him and turned sweetly away to look at the other chasers.

Bignose let out a guffaw. "Nope! Flynn _is _the Extreme, but today's extreme even for him!" he exclaimed.

"I don't know about that. You remember the bottle?" At Hook's obscure mention, the entire group—minus Rapunzel and Flynn—began chortling.

"Guys, this is not the time," Flynn protested, with a glance at her.

They ignored him. "So the tornado was right there," began Vlad, gesturing in front of him.

Hook: "Right in front of the van."

Vlad: "And the door swings open—"

Bignose: "And out swaggers this guy"—he thumps Flynn on the back—"_butt naked."_

Her eyes were fixed on him the whole time, and at this comment, she turned bright red and looked away. He felt protective of her again. She should not have such thoughts forced into her mind against her will. "I was _not _naked," he said.

Vlad: "Naked."

Hook: "And he's got this bottle of beer—"

Attila: "And he chugs it down, wipes off his mouth, and chucks it right at the funnel, shouting, _'Have a drink!'_"

Vlad: "And it never. Touches. The ground."

They all guffawed, Katrina included, but Rapunzel could not look up. Her face was red as a beet. Flynn was annoyed. "You're embarrassing her!"

"I'm sorry, lady," Bignose said, sounding genuinely contrite. He turned to Vlad. "What do you think that one was, F3?"

"Naw. He was way too close. Solid F2."

At this, Rapunzel perked up. "Oh! I was just thinking about the waterspout and the tornado we were in earlier. They didn't strike me as that powerful; after all, the Mustang came out of the first one without a scratch, and the second one couldn't get the car lifted completely off the ground. Do you think we'll see some F3s today?"

"I hope so," Vlad said.

"Maybe even an F4," added Hook.

"That'd be awesome."

"Have any of you ever seen an F5?" Rapunzel asked eagerly, looking around the group.

A strangled cry suddenly escaped from one of them. Flynn stood up. "I need air," he mumbled, and dashed out of the dining room. The group fell silent. Rapunzel glanced around, befuddled by his behavior, wordlessly asking the other chasers for an explanation.

Hook looked down at his empty plate. "One of us has."

She was still confused. Bignose spoke up. "His parents died in one when he was eight."

Her mouth dropped open in horror. "Oh, _no,"_ she said. _Well, that explains it,_ she thought. _He got upset earlier when I asked him what an F5 tornado could do. _She stood up and headed out the door, determined to find him and talk about it.

She found him trudging around Katrina's veranda, not looking at anything in particular. "Hi," she said in a small voice.

He turned to look at her. "Hi."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"It's fine," he said.

"No, it's not... but you can talk to me about it."

"I don't do back story," he said tightly.

It didn't sound sincere to her. In fact, it sounded like a canned answer he had given many times before and was merely used to saying. She frowned. "I've told you _my _back story. Why won't you open up to me?"

"I don't want to talk about this, all right?" he snapped. "You think I want to explain in gruesome detail about watching my parents die and my house get torn to pieces? I mean _really, _even a primitive swamp-dwelling hermit should be able to understand this!"

Her face crumpled, and he knew he had gone way too far this time. "Rapunzel, wait," he said. "I shouldn't have said that. I—"

"No," she said tightly, "I'm tired of this. I'm tired of you lashing out at me when I get too close to you. You don't want to talk about anything important? Fine! From this point onward until you take me back to the cabin, we're just going to talk business. _Current _storms. I know that an adrenaline rush is one feeling you _can_ handle," she finished snidely.

He stared at her, wide-eyed. "Rapunzel, wait. I'm sorry for lashing out. I really am, all right?"

She sighed. "But it keeps happening," she said quietly. "I don't know, Flynn. I don't like being treated this way."

He felt sick to hear these words from her. Anger he could deal with. Being angry meant that one cared about whatever had made them angry. Weariness and disillusionment—that was different. "It won't happen anymore," he said.

She looked skeptically at him. "I think it will until you come to terms with what happened that night." She paused. "I didn't come out here to ask for explicit details about what it looked like when your house was destroyed or what it felt like to lose your parents. I'm not a tragedy voyeur. I just thought you might want to talk about it on _your _terms."

He sighed. He supposed he should say something about it to her, now that he had been a jerk to her. "I got into the shelter in time," he said flatly. "They didn't. The last thing they said was that they loved me. Then they were pulled away into the storm, holding each other. I lost them, and I lost everything I owned except this satchel and a book."

She looked questioningly at him. "So is that why you take things? Because so much was taken away from you?"

"I don't take things," he snapped. What kind of response was that, anyway? She had no right to even know about his pickpocketing habit in the first place. She'd never seen him do it, had she?

She gave him a deeply skeptical look. "Right, and you had your satchel open for no particular reason when you were fingering Katrina's snow globe. By the way, I know you have a bottle of my medicine. I saw you slip it in your pocket at the cabin."

His eyes popped. How had she _seen_ that?

"I actually don't care if you take it, because it's very good for you—but I should warn you, it may change your hair—"

"I'm not going to use it," he said. He opened the satchel and pulled out the bottle. "And as a matter of fact, here it is. There's no point in my keeping it if you saw me take it."

"No, consider it a gift. There's plenty at the house."

"A gift," he repeated in disbelief.

"Has no one ever given you a gift?"

"My parents. After that, everything I got, I had to earn. Or... or swipe," he admitted. "But that's earning it, in a way. You have to work at it." He grinned, hoping to sound cool and smug about it, but not quite succeeding.

Her eyes were fixed on his face, trying to puzzle him out. "But you only want these things for trophies to signify power over other people?"

"Yes," he said sourly. "It's called kleptomania." For some reason, he felt a little better if he could call it a mental disorder with an actual name. If there was something _wrong_ with him, it absolved him of the responsibility.

She frowned. "That's pretty screwed up."

"_I'm _pretty screwed up, Blondie," he said gruffly.

"Well," she said quietly, "it's all right, because I am too." She gave him a look of something—not compassion, exactly—but empathy.

It was as if an electric surge had gone down his spine. No one had ever given him that look before. Whenever anyone knew him reasonably well—even the chase team—and felt any emotion about him whatsoever, it was pity, disdain, or envy. Never anything indicating that they saw him as an equal. He wasn't used to that and wasn't sure what to think of it.

"Thanks for listening," he said quickly. He made to walk away, almost running, when she called out.

"Wait."

He stopped without even thinking about it and turned around. "What is it?"

She fingered the stem of a flower and tilted her head up. There was a gleam in her eye. _"Were _you naked that time?" she asked with a grin.

His eyes popped. _That _wasn't what he'd expected. _Nice, _he thought. _You just got punked._ He tried hard to think of a good Flynn Rider comeback while smirking at her and watching her squirm. After a moment he spoke again. "You like that idea, do you? But if you want to think of me naked, there are _so_ many better contexts for it than that." He wagged an eyebrow and sauntered off, leaving her in the gazebo blushing hotly.

She was still wandering around when Katrina appeared.

"Oh, hi. Thanks for the meal," Rapunzel said uncomfortably. She hoped that she wasn't still blushing.

Katrina either did not recognize Rapunzel's discomfort or did not care. She sat down on a bench. "Have a seat," she said. Rapunzel sat down.

"Well," Katrina continued, "I hesitate to even bring it up, since you don't know me well. I'm sure it looks like meddling." She chuckled. "I guess we older folks can't help but meddle. But I've been noticing how you look at him."

Rapunzel's eyes bugged out. "I haven't been—"

Katrina waved her to be silent. "Please, honey. You aren't fooling either of us. Now, I have known that man for three years, ever since he started chasing with my son, and you are far from the first woman who's gone all goo-goo eyed over him. I warned 'em all. Women have to look after each other. Now, ordinarily, I'd warn a woman that he wasn't interested, though I was sure he'd be more'n happy to take her to bed if she really insisted on it, him being a man."

"Ms. Katrina," Rapunzel said, "I don't know where you are going with this, but I can assure you, I have no intention of asking him to bed." She blushed red at the idea.

"I believe you. My warning to you is different, because I think you _are _the first woman I've ever seen who's made _him_ interested in _you."_

Rapunzel's mouth dropped open, and a smile appeared at the corners of her lips. Katrina frowned. "That smilin' is exactly what I'm worried about. Listen here and listen good. You've got a chance to attach him, from the look of it. But I don't recommend it unless you want to spend your life patting him on the head and nursing his old wounds while he does nothing but resent it. He don't _want_ to heal. He thinks that if he stopped the pickpocketing and messing with everyone's head and trying to get himself killed, it would mean forgetting about his family. There ain't any logic in it, but he won't be convinced of that. And he'll drag you down too if you attach yourself to him."

Rapunzel was staring at Katrina. She seemed completely earnest and deadly serious. And what did she mean that Flynn _tried_ to get himself killed? He was reckless, but she assumed it was just because he was trying to get as close as possible to the storms, not because he had a literal death wish.

"So here is my advice, honey. Run as far away from him as you can, and don't look back." She gave Rapunzel a concerned look and walked back into the house.

Rapunzel's thoughts were roiling. Her own mother had warned her that people were selfish and used others, especially the innocent and kind. Surely Flynn wasn't deliberately, knowingly _using _her, though. He had said he liked her, and she thought he was telling the truth. He wasn't one of her mother's "bad people." She then thought about what Katrina had said. Katrina was saying, in different words, that Flynn might use her without consciously or maliciously trying to. The warnings unfortunately accorded quite well with her own observations of him. He definitely lashed out at her whenever she tried to help him or get close to him. She did not want to acknowledge that Katrina had a point, because she really did like him, but when she came back into the house, he was sitting on the couch and stealthily putting pieces of candy from the candy dish into his satchel. She shot him a death glare, startling him, and he instantly took his hand out of the dish. She pointedly sat down next to him, keeping an evil eye fixed on him all the while, and sighed. She _did _like him, but something had to change.


	10. Failure and Catalyst

**Author's Note**: Okay, so the delay with this chapter was not entirely proofing-related, nor entirely related to the length of this. This has turned a _lot _more autobiographical than I originally intended and it's not all that easy to write a big psychological problem when it's really YOUR problem, even if the cause of it is different. :/

And sorry ladies, I'm a girl too and I write fic in this category for the same reason you all do, but I _still_ find it _absolutely revolting_ when Maximus pulls his boot off in the movie. Think about what that foot has been through in that shoe—and with no socks or stockings! The opening of this chapter is a nod to that, and it's lighthearted because this fic will not be lighthearted again after this. Buckle up.

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><p><strong>Chapter 10: Failure and Catalyst<strong>

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><p>Before they left the house, Flynn decided to get a shower. They <em>had <em>brought him an extra set of clothes, and he had been up since the ungodly hour of five o'clock without slowing down. He had also run through the swamp, been hit more than once, and sweated a _lot._

The chasers always exchanged jokes—and practical jokes—with Katrina when they stopped at her house. She was practically one of the guys. There was nothing malicious about it; it was pure fun, so he thought nothing of it when he opened the second-story bathroom door and tossed his dirty clothes straight over the railing above the stairs. It would be funny if they fell on one of the team who happened to be passing by, and it would also be amusing if Katrina found them and decided to hide them somewhere as punishment.

"What the—_ewwww!_"

_Oh shit,_ Flynn thought. That had been Rapunzel's voice. The clothes had apparently fallen right on her face.

"Hey you!" she called upstairs before he could apologize, explain, or laugh. "The slob with the stinky clothes half the size of everyone else's!" Her voice was very loud, and he was pretty sure it was intentional.

Sure enough, loud boisterous laughter began to sound through the house. "Ouch, Rider!" called Vladimir.

"If you really think I want to see you nude, sorry, but I don't! If you smell as bad as the insides of your clothes, what _you _need to do is to get clean!" At that, the laughter increased.

"That's what I'm doing!" he called out in an ill-used tone, but he knew that the joke was definitely on him and there was no way to come out on top this time. _Well, I guess I deserved it for chucking my clothes on her head,_ he thought wryly as he got into the shower. He found that he didn't really mind the incident, despite being embarrassed. _She_ definitely enjoyed the banter, and he wondered if Katrina had put her up to it. _No, _he suddenly thought. _It was too spontaneous, and she's perfectly capable of this herself._ He realized that he rather liked her spunk. It was much more enjoyable to be around a happy, feisty Rapunzel than a depressed one or an angry one. He felt uncomfortable at the fact that whenever she had been angry, it was his fault. _I definitely won't take out my... problems... on her anymore,_ he thought. _It's not her fault._

While he was in the shower, they were getting ready to get on the road again. By the time he emerged, feeling wonderfully clean and refreshed, they were mostly ready to go. One of the guys had taken his dirty clothes off Rapunzel's hands and tossed them into Katrina's laundry, which she said needed to be done anyway, and they were washed by the time he was finished. There wasn't time to dry them; he would have to drape them over the seat of his car and let them air-dry.

The storm activity was still to the east of the marina and waterfront. In fact, a group of newly formed thunderstorms had sprung up not too many miles from the Duck Motel. The group gathered around the computer monitor in the back of Hook's van to look at data from that area.

"Look at this," Vladimir remarked, gesturing at an area of high instability in the region just northeast of the storms. "As soon as they hit this pocket of CAPE..."

"Boom," Flynn remarked with a grin.

"Are you thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?" Vlad asked the team.

"Moore can withstand an F3," Bignose said. "These... one of these might put one out."

"EHIs in this area are five to six? Yeah, I'd say so," Flynn said.

"It'd be awesome if we got data from the high end of what it can stand up to," Hook said.

"Do we have time to get there?" Rapunzel asked, with an uneasy glance at Flynn.

"I'm not going to drive like a fool, if that's why you're asking," he muttered ashamedly. "But yes, we have time."

Katrina came up behind them with a batch of homemade beignets. "Take some of these," she said, pushing the sack into Attila's hands. "You didn't get the chance to eat them here."

"Aw, Mother," the big guy said, seemingly embarrassed.

"Aw nothing. Y'all are crazy as loons to run those things down, but since you're going to do it anyway, at least you ought to be well fed. None of this fast food and snacks for meals. Now get on out of here," she ended affectionately.

* * *

><p>There was no hurry to get to the storms; they were not likely to intensify until they reached the area of strong instability, so the team drove at a comfortable speed. Rapunzel was quiet, and after a few failed attempts at striking up conversation, Flynn realized that she was preoccupied and decided not to interrupt her thought, either with speech or with noise from the radio. He turned it off. Nothing was going on anyway; Hook was just playing heavy metal, and that would probably distract Rapunzel from thinking. She certainly had plenty to think about. She <em>was <em>having the biggest day of her life; it was the first day she had been outside that cabin. He had to remind himself of that; she had adapted well enough that he certainly would not have guessed such a thing if he had not known it already.

Rapunzel _was_ indeed thinking about her flood of new experiences. She had been pretty frightened when her treehouse cabin—the refuge that her mother had always said was safe and secure—had been breached and Flynn had so easily leaped inside, but now she was glad that he had. She had already seen two twisters and was likely to see more. She had been to a motel, had seen the waterfront, had discovered new recipes that her mother did not know, and had learned about cars and phones and radars and all sorts of things that she did not have in her cabin.

Rapunzel was conflicted about the cabin now. It was her home, the only one she had ever known, and she had at first supposed that she would return once this was over. However, she knew that something was now irrevocably changed and she would not be able to go back to living as she had always lived. Now that she had tasted the wider world, she could not stand the idea of staying shut up inside with her mother for the rest of her life. She just was not at all sure how her mother would take this news. Mother had been hurt pretty badly by people who used her skills and inventions for their own selfish purposes, and Rapunzel did not think it was that likely that she would change her mind about that. In fact, she soon had to acknowledge to herself that it was probably going to end up being a choice. _Either _she could have the home she had always known _or _she could be part of the outside world, but not both. She knew, deep down, what her choice would be, but thinking of it still made her feel a pang of remorse and a chill of dread. She was really going to hurt her mother once she told her that she was leaving home. And what then? Where would she go?

She recalled that she had met a whole group of people who watched the sky just as she did, who in fact had made a _job _out of watching the sky and got _paid _to do it. People could buy homes with money that they earned. She would apparently have to do that. Flynn had told her that her sensors were a good idea, too, and that he wanted to show them to his bosses at the lab where he worked. Perhaps she could get hired at this lab. –No, that was ridiculous, she thought; these guys had done this for years and knew so much more about it than she did. It was naïve to expect to get a job there immediately.

"Flynn," she suddenly said.

"Hmm?"

"I was just thinking."

"I guessed as much," he said with a smile.

She laughed. "Well, I was wondering about something. I don't think I can go back to the way things were before—I mean with the cabin and never going out and everything."

"I don't think you _should _go back to that."

"Well, my mother—I just don't see how she will ever go out into the world again. Of course, she _does _venture outside, but she doesn't _participate _in the world the way you and the other guys do. And if I went back home to live with her, I think she would try to keep me inside again."

Flynn did not know what to say. He had thought the same thing, and the idea made him feel ill. If Rapunzel went back to that life after _this, _it would kill her or drive her insane. And the idea of not seeing her again because of a paranoid mother who would not allow her to have any contact with the outside world—well, _that _idea bothered him more than he could stand.

"So I was thinking about how I could, you know, make a home for _myself._ I'll have to have a job. Do you really think your bosses will be impressed with my sensors? Because I'd love to work at the lab, but I just don't know if I _know _enough to get hired."

_Ugh,_ he thought. _Why did she have to bring up _that _subject?_ He did not want to think about this. If anyone had a right to use the sensors to get a job at the lab, it was Rapunzel, not him. But if he didn't get his old job back—without her knowing he had been fired—he was sure she would dump him for lying to her repeatedly. _Wait, dump me?_ he thought. _We're not dating. Why did I think of it that way?_

He pushed his confused thoughts aside and tried to think of something to say to her. She _did _need to have some means of supporting herself, and she did _not _need to go back to that cabin or that mother. It was unfortunate that the mother was mentally ill, but it didn't sound as if she was unable to take care of herself. Indeed, it was quite the opposite; she had lived very self-sufficiently for eighteen years, apparently. If she didn't _want _to be helped, Flynn knew very well that nothing could change her mind. Rapunzel had to live her own life.

"I expect you could get hired at the lab," he finally said. "Not everyone there is a senior storm chaser. Some people are just fresh out of primary school and are there because they're interested. You know a lot more about the topic than they do, trust me."

She looked relieved. "You really think so?"

"Yes. I think you're brilliant."

She grinned from ear to ear and blushed pink. "Well, thank you," she said modestly. "No one has ever complimented me like that before."

He turned his head in surprise. "Not even your mother?"

Rapunzel looked down. "She's always finding faults with me," she muttered. "Lately she thinks I've gained weight. Do I look chubby to you?"

Flynn groaned. She had a small frame and was on the thin side. How could she think herself chubby? "Rapunzel, you are as far from being chubby as Vladimir is from being short and scrawny," he said. "If that's what she does to you, you _definitely _need to get your own place."

"But the job—and the sensors! How are we going to get to the lab in time for me to show them to your bosses? Does it stay open late into the night?"

"No, I'll have to take them by the lab tomorrow, after the outbreak is over. We're planning to chase storms into the night, you know. I can drop you off at your cabin late tonight and then help you get a job and get settled into the city, or wherever you'd like to live, later on."

"You don't have to take me back _tonight. _My mother won't be back home for three days! I can come with you to the lab tomorrow." She grinned.

_I'm going to have to give this up, _he thought. _She's got her own plans now, which she has every right to make, and she's not going to let me walk off with the sensors. I'm going to have to get my job back honestly._ The thought somehow relieved him. He really didn't want to cheat her.

"Well, if you insist," he said. "I'm not sure what our plans are for the night—whether we're going to try to head home or stay overnight somewhere. I guess it depends on how tired we all are and how far we end up from the city. I'll have to think about it."

* * *

><p>As the team had expected, the broken line of thunderstorms grew rapidly into classic supercells once they reached the unstable air. Flynn turned the communications radio back on and began debating with the others which storm to aim for.<p>

"I say hit the south one," Bignose said. "That's generally the best bet."

"It's on the edge of the high EHI and is going to leave it," Flynn disagreed. "The one northeast of it's going to be the one that blows up."

"I don't know," Attila said uncertainly. "It's hard to backtrack if we screw up. If we need to go after the south one after all, we'll have to punch through it."

"We'll have to do that anyway," Hook said grimly. "On the current heading, we'll have to punch the core of the south one to get to Flynn's storm. Unless there are other roads... but that's the long way 'round."

"They're mostly dirt," Attila said. "It's the freeway or nothing, I think. Rider, are you sure about that storm?"

"The south storm is not going to be anything but a hailer, I assure you. And really, how often have I been wrong about something like this?" He grinned. Rapunzel shook her head in amused exasperation.

"Can your car get through that?"

He grimaced. "Without damage? I doubt it. But I have insurance."

Rapunzel turned to him worriedly. "Flynn, please don't do anything stupid."

"Sometimes you've got to drive through the core," he said. "I won't do 150 in those conditions, don't worry." This seemed to mollify her.

They approached the line of storms, Flynn putting a decent amount of space between his white Mustang and Hook's van, when suddenly Vladimir's voice crackled over the radio. "Asshole warning," he muttered.

It was not a second too soon. A black pickup truck sped down the road, gunning straight for Flynn's rear bumper. It did not appear that they were going to stop. The ugly leers of the Stabbingtons came into focus in the rear view mirror. Rapunzel glanced up and noticed a third person in their back seat, and then that person bent down—or ducked?—removing them from sight. The truck continued to bear down closer and closer.

"Son of a bitch!" Flynn swore, swerving onto the shoulder. The Stabbingtons whirled past him. _Is that what I looked like to people earlier today?_ he thought uncomfortably.

"Who else would they have with them?" Rapunzel asked.

"No idea," he said. "Whoever it is doesn't seem to care what they do."

"Hey, Flynn," Hook called over the radio, "you still sure about this storm? Take a gander at the south one now."

He navigated to the radar app on his phone and zoomed in on the southern storm. It did look better than he had expected. But as he looked at different altitudes on the radar, he realized...

"The updraft is too strong. Hailer, as I said. Probably at least golf ball sized," he finished grimly. "Buckle your seatbelts, guys."

"_They _want to intercept," Bignose said. Flynn and Rapunzel glanced out the window. The Stabbingtons had taken an exit off the freeway and were heading in the direction of the southwest corner of the storm, where—if it were tornadic—a tornado would descend.

"And that's another point in favor of the northeast one," Flynn said smugly. Laughter erupted over the radio.

They soon entered the precipitation core of the southern thunderstorm. Rain gave way to a mix of rain and marble-sized hail. Rapunzel had experienced hail before; a barrage of one-inch hail had damaged her mother's solar collectors the last time it fell. She had had to leave the cabin for almost a week to get the parts to repair the equipment.

The hail grew in size. Egg-sized stones began falling at regular intervals, smashing on the pavement. Rapunzel peered out her window to watch the chunks of ice shatter upon impact. Flynn was swearing under his breath repeatedly as hailstones dinged the body of his car.

Suddenly a stone smashed into the front windshield. Rapunzel jumped in her seat and gasped in horror at the bull's-eye that it left in the glass.

"_Shit!" _Flynn swore. He cringed, bit his lip, and took a deep breath as he continued into the storm. Another large stone struck the windshield, leaving a spider's web of fracture lines. Then another.

"We're getting hammered in here!" Hook said through a background of static from the poor conditions surrounding all of them. "Rider, that storm you want had better be—"

"Look at it!" he interrupted, gripping his phone. "Look at velocity! If that's not a tornado, I don't know what is!"

There was a pause. "Damn," Hook said. "I see what you mean. Strongest couplet we've seen all day."

Finally, as they emerged from the core, the hail dropped in size and gave way to rain again. Heavy rain turned light as they left the southern thunderstorm. Finally all precipitation ended, giving them a clear view of the southwest region of the storm Flynn had wanted to chase. The cloud was dark gray and roiling, but if it had a tornado, it was obscured by a tree-covered hill in front of them.

Flynn had put a significant distance between himself and Hook's van. "Radar's incredible," Bignose said. "You're good, man. You totally called this."

"I know," he said, grinning. _"Don't_ doubt me."

"We can't see you. You got a visual?"

He frowned. "No. There's a hill in the way, but I bet it's right past it."

They climbed the hill, the powerful engine of the Mustang roaring, and then they saw it. _"Look!"_ Rapunzel cried, pointing frantically to their right, but it was not necessary. The tornado was as black as its parent cloud, and it was skipping around the landscape like a dancer, heading basically northeastward, but jumping—or seeming to jump, as the condensation funnel sometimes vanished and then reappeared. It was about two hundred meters wide at the base, Flynn estimated, giving them some leeway in where to set up the instruments. On its current path, it would pass right over the freeway. This was a perfect spot to deploy.

"Confirmation," Flynn said over the radio, but it seemed redundant.

"I say we deploy," Vladimir said. The rest of the team agreed. They approached the expected path of the tornado. Flynn parked his damaged vehicle out of the path, in case the tornado threw debris at them, and waited for the others to arrive. He pulled out his phone and took a look at the storm that the Stabbingtons had tried to intercept. It was weakening. He laughed viciously. They didn't have enough time now to get to this storm.

The van and truck pulled up, and the whole team got into the back of Vladimir's truck. The instruments had been covered in a tarp to protect them from the hail. They pulled this off and unloaded the canister from the bed of the truck.

"I'd say it's two minutes to impact!" Attila called as they awkwardly carried the thing to a spot just off the shoulder of the road and set it down. The tornado churned in the distance.

Flynn pushed a button on the machine and watched as spikes emerged from the base. With a mechanical whirr, they began to spin and dig into the dirt, anchoring the cylinder into the ground. The soil seemed to be kind of loose where it had been churned up, Flynn thought briefly, but he didn't worry too much about it. "You got the computer on?" he called over the roar of the approaching storm.

"Ready to go," Hook confirmed. They dashed away from the instruments and back into their vehicles. The van and the truck were far more likely than the car to be picked up or rolled by the storm, having taller wheels and poorer aerodynamics, so Hook and Vlad hit the gas at once and roared well out of the path of the storm. Flynn moved out a bit too, but he wanted a view of this. This was the consummation of his life's dream. With this, he would get his job back, but just as importantly, he would feel—something. He wasn't sure how to articulate it. Settling a score, perhaps.

The tornado approached the cylinder, becoming narrower at the base as it did. Flynn frowned. Surely it wasn't going to _miss._ Rapunzel was transfixed, staring wordlessly at the tornado as it drew closer. Her mouth was slightly open in awe.

The funnel neared, its black curtain of soil and condensed water and natural debris soon enveloping the cylinder, though not obscuring it from view. Flynn's heart leaped.

"Impact! Have we got data?" he called out.

"Not yet... no wait, something just came in! Wind gust! Folks, we have an F3 here!" Vlad called out.

Cheers erupted over the radio. Flynn turned to Rapunzel with a giddy smile. She beamed back at him and pulled him into an embrace, staring up at his eyes. His breath caught. God, she was beautiful. But if he did this, then he would also be kissing goodbye to any possibility of being "just friends." She would expect more than that. Still, riding on the emotional high of probably having his job back and the historic success of his pet project, he rather liked the idea of going out with her. Fear had no place in his mind when he felt like this, and it _was_ a suitable time for a kiss. He leaned in and placed a hand on her cheek. She closed her eyes and waited. He had just begun to close his own when something caught his eye.

The cylinder shifted in the swirling wind.

It seemed like only one moment. He drew back from her, gaping in horror at what he was witnessing. Her eyes fluttered open in disappointment and anger, but immediately she saw what had distracted him, and the anger vanished. They watched in utter dismay as the canister of instruments rocked back and forth several times in the winds, lifted oh so slightly—

—And came completely out of the ground in a torrent of dirt that had been loosened by the spikes that dug into the earth. The funnel picked it up like it was an aluminum can and hurled it violently against a tree. The crunch was like a shot. Something protruding from the canister—some instrument—shattered upon impact with the tree and got picked up by the circulation.

"_No!"_ There was heartbreak in that shout. He stood rooted to the ground, staying outside the circulation more because of shock than fear of the storm. A gust of cold air originating in the storm passed over them. Then, as if it had decided that its work was finished, the funnel lifted off the ground. Without a word, Flynn took off like a madman in the direction of the instrument canister.

"What the—" Hook's voice crackled over the radio. "Rider, the radar couplet just freaking fell apart!"

"Downdraft," said Bignose. "You guys get blasted with cold air?"

"We did," Rapunzel said, since he was not there. "Guys, I... the instruments are—"

"It's reforming!" Hook interrupted. "Heads up!"

Rapunzel gasped and looked at the sky. The funnel was slowly descending again. "I've got to go!" she shouted into the mic. "The instruments got uprooted and damaged and he's _out there _trying to set them up again!"

She ran from the vehicle to the field where Flynn was frantically trying to lift the canister upright. The black cloud swirled threateningly overhead as she reached him. The canister was dented and smudged, and Rapunzel could tell that most of the external instruments were seriously damaged and probably inoperable. Flynn had a cut on one arm, apparently from the metal on a broken instrument, and he looked positively crazed.

"Flynn, stop it!" She grabbed him around the waist and tried to pull him away. "It's not worth _killing_ yourself for!"

He was beside himself. "You don't get it!" he exclaimed. "I might as well be dead if I can't do this!"

She let go of him and whirled around to face him. _"What?"_

He couldn't answer. Pain filled every corner of his face. She could tell he was very close to breaking down and was probably not fully aware of what was happening around him. Out the corner of one eye, she saw the Barn Burner van and unicorn truck coming back into view. He probably wouldn't want the team to witness this. She took his hand and led him away from the broken instruments. He did not resist. He didn't say anything at all.

As they approached his car again, she remembered what Katrina had told her. Hesitantly she spoke again. "Are you trying to _join _them? They wouldn't want that," she said feebly. Loss of this magnitude was something she had never experienced, and she didn't know what to say, but she knew that parents would never want their child to die.

"Who told you that, Katrina? If I _wanted_ to die, I wouldn't waste time doing it this way," he said grimly.

"But you just said—"

"You don't understand how important this is," he said, his voice breaking. "And I _know_ what they would want. They would want me to _master _the damn things."

"So no one else has to suffer the same thing?"

He drew back as if he had been slapped. He looked furious, though she could tell the anger was not directed at her. "No! It's not about _anyone_ else."

"Then what is it about?" she exclaimed. "Why do you _do _this?"

"Because... that fucking thing took away _everything I had!_ Family, home, the life I'd known, even my identity! I just want to make it equal... to demystify... to take something away from _it."_ Suddenly he stopped. His chest, which had been heaving, suddenly seemed to constrict. It was as if he turned to stone. A barrier seemed to pass over his face. He had said too much, and from the look of shock on his face, Rapunzel guessed he had even said things that he himself was not consciously aware had been there.

She could tell that he was regretting it immediately, but she also detected the truth in his words. She looked at him, horror and sadness in her eyes. "Flynn, even if you understand it, you'll never be able to _control_ it." She heaved a sigh. "That's what _all _of it is about, isn't it?"

"All of what?" he said tightly.

"You try to manipulate everything around you to get things exactly the way you think you want them, but some things you just can't... sometimes you just have to trust and hope. What you're doing is no different from what my—" She broke off. "The storm threw your life out of control. I get that. And now you can't stand the thought of _anything_ being out of your control, but you just can't _live_ this way. Is that even really what you _want_, to have everything exactly on _your _terms? You're not an _island, _Flynn."

She could tell he was close to a complete meltdown from having the deepest parts of his mind laid bare. "Yes, I am. I have _nothing."_ His voice was breaking again.

"That's not true! You have your job—"

_Oh, God,_ he thought sickly. "Rapunzel, about that job—" He broke off. The last chance he'd had of getting that job back had probably smashed to pieces against a tree.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing. This was just more important for that job than you realize." Another lie, this one a lie of omission. He felt ashamed of himself.

"I'm sure they'll understand," she said. He could only stare miserably at her. She looked sympathetically at him and continued. "You also have your friends—"

"I haven't got any. These guys tolerate me; that's all."

"What? They obviously see you as a friend! Can't you see it?"

He had to admit the truth in her words. They had taken him out for drinks when he had been fired. They had been worried about him when he went missing. They had joked and laughed and had good times with him for three years. They were his friends. He looked at her and knew that she was reading the admission in his eyes. She was wavering, though, trying to come to a decision about something. He opened his mouth to speak—

"And you have me!" she burst out.

He drew back and stared at her, his heart suddenly pounding faster. "Are you saying what it sounds like you are?"

"Yes, Flynn." Her voice was very quiet.

All of a sudden he couldn't stand hearing that name. He blanched, as if he were about to admit to a crime, and then he supposed that in a way, he was. Rapunzel's mother had committed a horrible crime against her, keeping her locked up her whole life to keep her from being hurt. He had done the same thing to himself, and for the same reason. The storm had not taken away his identity. _ He_ had. The realization crashed over him like a wave.

"Eugene," he finally said. It had been a _long _time since he had said that name.

Her eyes snapped upward. "What?"

"Get back into the car and I'll explain."

The tornado, which had been completely forgotten, rushed back to their minds as they got into the Mustang—but it was apparently lifted for good now. Only broad rotation showed up on the portable radar, and as he looked at the wall cloud, he saw signs of disintegration. Through the rear view mirror, they saw Ulf and Vladimir lifting the ruined canister into the back of Vladimir's unicorn truck. He didn't seem able to speak until after the other team members were on the road again, and she did not press him. Finally he sighed and ran his hands over the back of his head.

"My birth name is Eugene Fitzherbert. I've never told anyone that before."

She grew wide-eyed. "Why..."

"I was eight years old. I'd just lost everything, and I was sitting in some Corona government office while these three jerks talked about how I was better off with them dead because they were criminal squatters living out of wedlock. They _were _married," he said bitterly, "but they lived outside the border, and records are sparse there. So no one knew my real name, and one of the two possessions that I still had was a book they had given me for my birthday, _The Tales of Flynnagan Rider._ I loved the character," he said with a dark laugh. "I couldn't stand the thought of those creeps insulting my parents by their true names... or knowing _my _name. It seemed like... like power over me," he said, looking at her shamefacedly. "And officially I've been Flynn ever since."

Her eyes were soft with sadness. "Oh, Fl—Eugene," she said. "That's... I can't even imagine." She paused. "And incidentally, what I was actually going to ask was why you trusted _me _with your birth name out of everyone you've ever met."

He didn't know. Or, rather, he did know, but he didn't want to admit it out loud. The unspoken reason seemed to make the very temperature increase inside the Mustang, and as he looked at her figure, her hair mussed and windswept, his breath caught in his chest. He turned to her with an unfathomable look in his eyes. There was fear there still, but also interest, curiosity, and longing. She leaned in and they met halfway across the seat. Their lips touched. She let out a little moan and opened her mouth, and immediately he responded. His hand cupped her cheek as they deepened the kiss.

"Hey, Rider, you coming or not?" crackled a voice over the radio. It jerked him back to reality, and they broke apart.

"Heading out right now," he said. "I'm signing off, all right? That bothered me back there. I just need some time to think."

"Okay," said Bignose. "Don't get too far behind. We're heading for the Duck Motel to try to repair Moore."

"My Mustang can run circles around what you guys drive," he said smoothly. "I'll catch up." And at that, he started the engine and drove in the direction of the chase team caravan.

Once they were in sight, he turned off the radio. "I just don't feel like talking to them right now," he explained.

"You'd rather talk to me?" she said with a smirk.

He smirked back and leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. "Obviously."

She smiled. "It means a lot to me that you told me your real name," she said softly. "Are you... do you think you want to talk about the rest of what happened that night? You can tell me, you know."

"I'd rather spare you the sob story. It's a downer, really." He didn't think this excuse would work, but it was worth a try.

Sure enough, she gave him a skeptical look. "Look, I won't judge you. There is nothing wrong with being sad about something like this... even years later."

He sighed in assent. She was right, but he had never had to tell this story himself before. When he went to the orphanage, when he became an apprentice, when he joined the laboratory, and when he became part of the senior chase team, other people had told about the storm in quiet, sympathetic, pitying tones. People who had not experienced such a thing themselves. Somehow it was less personal that way, especially since they could only give the third-person details about the incredibly powerful twister, the house being reduced to rubble, the storm cellar exposed to the elements, and the little child found curled up in a ball at the base of a debarked tree, clutching a bag as if his life depended on it. When people spoke of the tragically lost Mr. and Mrs. _Rider, _it was _almost _like hearing someone else's story.

A few hours ago, he had not wanted to discuss the subject at all because of the subconscious fear of what else it would dredge up if he did. Well, Rapunzel had figured it out without any help. She understood him scarily well. And he realized that he _wanted_ her to hear the story from him rather than from anyone else.

It wasn't bad at all, it turned out. She was understanding, sympathetic, and even shed a tear or two when he described emerging from the storm cellar and calling out to his parents, never getting an answer. He couldn't bring himself to cry, but it felt good to finally talk about it. No one had ever heard what had _actually happened_ to him as _he _had experienced it. That memory, as well as most of the memories from his childhood before he was orphaned, had been shoved into a locked box in his mind along with his real name. It felt good to open the box.

They lapsed into a pleasant silence as the car approached the motel, more because she needed to think again than because he didn't want to talk. He could have talked to her all night, he was pretty sure, but he didn't want to talk _at _her if she needed some quiet time. As she thought, she fiddled with a lock of her hair, biting her lip at the same time. He didn't want to interrupt her, but he was extremely curious about what it might be. He turned to her at last to ask, but she spoke first.

"Eugene, I was just thinking about what you said earlier about this deployment being important for your job."

"Oh?" he said anxiously. Well, maybe he didn't want to talk to her all night about _some _subjects.

"Yeah. If you need data today, then I want to help you. And if repairing your instruments doesn't work out, you _do _have another option."

He sighed. "I appreciate the offer, but I really don't think I do. Those sensors won't help us tonight unless something can receive the data that they gather, and you left your radio at your cabin."

"I know, but that's what I was thinking about. _You_ have equipment that can pick up signals. My sensors are made out of standard instruments just like you use at the lab. Why couldn't it just be changed to pick up the frequencies that _my _sensors use?"

He blinked. It _could._ "I... don't see any reason at all why not," he said. "If you know how to do that."

"I did it for my own station."

He turned to her with a goofy grin. "Did I happen to mention earlier that you were brilliant? You may have just saved my—the day," he quickly corrected.

She beamed. "So as soon as we get to the Duck Motel, I'll get into the back of the van or truck, wherever the equipment is, and set it up."

* * *

><p><strong>Note:<strong> Clearly there are more matters that need to be dealt with (and let's just say that a LOT will catch up with him next chapter), but the control issue is really driving it all.

**Terminology Note:** CAPE is convective available potential energy. Basically, it's the amount of energy available in the air to power the vertical development of thunderstorms. "EHI" refers to the energy helicity index, a measure of CAPE and low-level helicity (rotational motion in the air, essentially) that is strongly associated with tornado formation. EHI of 5+ is pretty good.


	11. Reckoning

SURPRISE! Told ya that chapter 11 was almost written!

**Note: ** The story is going to keep its rating, because I'm skittish about this chapter and the next. It is nonetheless toned down from what it was originally planned to be, and I doubt I'll need to explain exactly what got changed. It just didn't seem realistic when it came down to writing it. If you're disappointed, there's a one-shot that I wrote that shouldn't disappoint. ;) Also, the use of names in this chapter is deliberate and purposeful. I just hope it isn't a weird distraction.

**WARNING: ** Abuse. Sorry. Saying it like that makes it sound worse than (IMO) it is, but I think it qualifies—on both sides.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 11: Reckoning<strong>

* * *

><p>"I don't think we can fix it," Hook said grimly. He jerked away a bent wind vane that he had been trying to reattach, leaped off the bed of Vladimir's truck, and handed it to Rapunzel, who sat on the floor of his van. She looked at it with some interest and put it into a cardboard box that already contained numerous broken instruments from Moore. She sat next to another box bearing a live python, which she was stroking tenderly. Her legs dangled out the back of the van as she watched the proceedings with a mix of curiosity and pity.<p>

They were parked on the north side of the Duck Motel, all three vehicles close together. The van and truck had taken a pounding in the hail storm and had more impacts on their windshields than the Mustang had. _And for nothing, _Eugene thought. _A complete waste._ He felt awful about it. The lab paid for the insurance on the others' chase vehicles (not, of course, their personal vehicles), and because of _him,_ they would have to file a claim. He had not just failed at the chance of getting his job back. He had probably dug himself in an even deeper hole. He _really _hoped that he had not cost any of them their jobs for taking direction from him on the chase. As he glanced toward the twilit sky, it seemed to him that his association with the lab had set along with the sun. And with that—_no._ He would not lose her. Somehow he would work this out. Maybe he would pretend to her that after the fiasco with Moore and the big revelation, he had just _quit _his job. That might work. He tried not to think about the fact that it would be yet another lie.

Eugene sighed in resignation. "It's fine. It wouldn't really matter anyway, because the same thing would happen again. Even if we didn't try to anchor it into the ground, it'd be picked up and hurled. Leaving aside the spikes churning up the soil, it's just the wrong dimensions altogether. Too light to stay on the ground, but too broad and tall to avoid being hit with debris."

"We probably shouldn't have deployed it in a forested area either," Bignose said.

"I guess the one good thing about it is that since the Stabbingtons stole my design outright, they won't get a deployment either, even if they _did _somehow get it in the path."

They looked at each other glumly. "Well," Hook said, "I guess we need to decide what to do tonight. The outbreak isn't over, but I don't know if anyone wants to try for anything else now."

Eugene glanced at Rapunzel, then at the others. They had no idea that she had invented an alternate design, and he didn't really want them to find out like this. Somehow, the subject of his dismissal had not come up at all during the day, at least when he had the communications radio on, and he wanted to keep it that way. He also did not want them to suspect that the original reason he had brought her along was to rip her off, which he was sure would occur to them if she spilled. He had to get them out of here so that she could have the equipment to herself to reprogram it.

"I don't think I can get back to the city," he said. "I've been up longer than anyone and I've probably had the roughest day. I vote for staying the night."

"Yeah, probably a good idea," Hook agreed.

"You guys can go on in," he said. "I—no offense, guys, but this needs to be organized. It's a mess. Anything I shouldn't look at?" he asked Hook with a wink.

"You're going to _clean _my _chase van?"_ Hook exclaimed. "What's the catch, Rider?"

"No catch."

"Disorganized or not, I know exactly what's in there," he warned, "and I'll know if something's gone."

"I'm not going to steal anything," he said in an offended tone. _What a wonderful reputation I have,_ he thought grimly. "I really do just want to organize it. I kind of feel bad about the damage and want to make up for it a little."

"What the hell did she _do _to you, man?" he sputtered. "Has she got 'em in a jar in your car or something?"

Rapunzel turned pink, and Eugene laughed. "I didn't think that wanting to do a favor for friends meant that you had no balls," he said.

Hook was still gaping in amazement. "Dude, I don't know what happened with you today, but I think you need to stick with her. Just saying." He and the rest of the lab team began heading in the direction of the motel to check in, leaving Eugene and Rapunzel outside.

He turned on the laptop and brought up the data acquisition program. "I think you know what to do," he said softly once they were out of earshot.

* * *

><p>As Rapunzel worked, Eugene tried to organize the supplies in Hook's Barn Burner. It really was a mess. There was a first aid kit, the extra portable radar dome, face paint... <em>Face paint? That's strange. <em>Spare sets of clothes, tagged by name. A can of cinnamon-and-vanilla-flavored coffee, which made him wrinkle his _perfect_ nose in disgust, but he knew whose that was. Empty beer bottles. Classical sheet music. Well, that was probably Hook's; he was a music buff, but Eugene didn't know his musical tastes extended beyond rock and metal. Pink and purple ceramic unicorns, which had to belong to Vladimir, but still... Eugene had no idea that his unicorn obsession included collecting little girly knickknacks. Then.. _Valentine_ cards? Love poems written to... _Agnetha?_ The Koenigs' secretary? _What on earth? All right, what do these guys get up to anyway? And how come I never knew about it?_ He resolved to ask some questions of the whole gang the next morning.

"Eugene," she said suddenly.

He snapped his head up. "Hmm?"

"Get one of them out of the car, would you? I want to test it out."

He headed over to his car, opened the trunk, slit open the box, and removed one of the sensors. He examined it closely. It seemed to have a switch that activated it. That was unfortunate. There were a _lot _of those things and they would have to be activated one by one. _So it's not a perfect design,_ he thought. _The instruments in these things probably aren't going to be ideal either, since they came from radiosondes, but it's still incredible that she did this, and once it _is _perfected..._ He headed toward the van with the little sensor and handed it off to her. She turned it on and watched the computer screen obsessively. Readings started pouring in.

"_It works!"_ she cried, bursting into a smile. She shut the sensor off, leaped out of the truck, and threw herself headlong into Eugene's arms, beaming at him. He leaned in to kiss her. She kissed back fiercely, and very quickly it turned intense as they tried to outdo each other, but there was nothing deliberate or calculated about this. It just happened. Flynn Rider was not accustomed to having amorous encounters get out of his control, but then, this was Eugene, who was starting to find acceptable the idea that he couldn't control everything. As she moaned and gasped at his touch, he pushed her against the side of the van to give her more.

When they broke apart a few minutes later, he was breathing heavily. _That _was definitely something he hadn't ever felt before. She was staring back at him in surprise as well. "Eugene, I—wow," she said, blushing pink.

"Impressed?" he said with a smirk. She grinned back. "Then let's get this crap locked up and get out of here."

They organized the back of the van as well as they could before locking it up and going into the motel. Neither of them noticed the black truck that pulled in to the parking lot and slowly eased into the shadows.

* * *

><p>After a quick supper of bar food and one of Katrina's beignets, Eugene went to the front desk to take a room for the night. After going out to the car to sneak that damn snake of hers into the room, he returned to the lounge. Rapunzel sat at a table looking bored, her glass of soda empty. The rest of the team looked tired and dejected, idly watching the television in the corner.<p>

"Hey," he said, ruffling her hair, "I got you a room."

She looked up. "What about the rest of you?"

"They can take care of themselves."

"'They'?" she asked suspiciously, eyeing him.

He smirked. "Yes, they." He leaned in and kissed her. Her eyes closed in bliss as she began to kiss him back. They embraced tightly, and he stroked her cheek.

"Want to head out?" he whispered after a couple more minutes. She grunted affirmatively. He helped her up and strode out of the bar with his arm around her waist. There were catcalls from the team, but they only encouraged him. The air outside was muggy and warm, but neither of them paid any attention to that. They stumbled up the open-air staircase to the room. He opened the door, pushed her into the room, and kicked the door shut.

The first thing she noticed was that there was only one bed. She blinked and gave him a scolding look. Nonchalantly he sat down and patted the mattress next to him, indicating that she should come over. She hesitated, then took a deep breath and sat down next to him. He pulled her to him and began to kiss her again before finally pulling her down and rolling on top of her. He slipped a hand under the waistband of her skirt and underwear and began to pull them down.

She let out a cry and started to squirm under him. It did not feel like a squirm of pleasure to him. It felt, instead, like a struggle_._ He stopped and looked at her. "You okay?" he asked, looking concernedly at her.

"I'm fine," she said. "It's just... I've never done it before—"

"Well, I assumed as much."

"—and I'm _so exhausted _from today, and besides, I'm not comfortable with it. I just... don't want to yet."

Eugene pulled away and rolled off her to lie next to her. Argument and persuasion didn't even enter his thoughts. If she didn't want this, that was that. He looked at her. "Well, that's fine. I'm not going to pressure you into anything."

She relaxed and curled against him, letting out a sigh of contentment as she did. Eugene wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her closer, and nuzzled her head.

For the first time in a very long time, he felt really good. Happy, even. It felt so right for her to be nestled against him like this. She was beautiful. He tousled her hair, evoking a moan of pleasure. She snuggled closer and closed her eyes.

"Hey," Eugene said softly, "why don't you get some rest? It's been a long day."

"Is it going to be okay outside?" she mumbled.

"Uh-huh. The guys are downstairs, keeping an eye on it. They'll wake us up if it gets bad around here, and since you're with the storm lab's senior chase team, you couldn't be in better hands if you tried," he said smugly. "Just rest." His eyes closed involuntarily. He really had been up a _long time._ He realized he was exhausted too, and he knew that he would get a good sleep with her cuddled against him.

"Okay." She yawned and curled against him. "Eugene," she said. Her breath was hot against his side.

"Yeah?"

"I'm glad you found my cabin."

"Yup, I am too."

"You are?"

"Of course. This is the best thing to happen in my life in... well, a long time." _That's true enough, _he thought with a smile. _I feel like a whole person again._

She smiled. "Mine too." She looked up at him, eyes wide, and spoke in an awed whisper. "Eugene, I think I'm falling in love."

His eyes popped open. _WHAT?_ he screamed in thought. With that word, a weight seemed to sink into his stomach like a rock. _No. No no no no no. This is really, really bad. Once she finds out about the job, that's it—and she will find out. How could I have let this happen? How could I have let this get so out of hand?_ He was worried about her heart being broken by the discovery of his lies, but _she _would have feelings of anger and betrayal to kill off the affection she had formed. He, on the other hand, would not have anything to lessen— No. He wouldn't admit it. Admitting it would make it true.

He did not want to be there. He didn't want to feel her against him. It was hard to fight the emotions when she was right there. But she wasn't asleep yet. He'd have to wait for her to doze off before leaving. He knew he had to say _something, _though, or she would get upset and would never get to sleep. "I am too," he said, feeling horrible as he spoke the words even though they weren't a lie. He stroked her cheek. She gave a sigh of contentment.

It did not take long for her to conk. The events of the day had clearly worn her out. Her breaths became regular, and her grip loosened as her body relaxed. When he was sure that she was asleep, he carefully untangled himself from her arms and got off the bed. She let out a little moan when he got off the bed and made the bedsprings creak, but he watched carefully, and she didn't seem to be awake. Silently Flynn sneaked out of the room.

When he returned to the bar looking downcast, the rest of the gang gaped at him in astonishment. "Something wrong?" Hook asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Whoa there, you don't know what you're asking," Attila said. "If she wanted to use a toy on him or anything, then my sympathies, man"—to Flynn—"but I don't really want to hear about it."

"Oh, just shut up," Flynn muttered as he collapsed at the bar. He put his head in his hands. "I am a total fuck-up."

"I ain't gonna argue the point, but why in particular?" Hook asked.

"What I want to know is why you're back down here instead of up there with her," Bignose said. "She's not some girl you picked up in the bar, you know. You ought to spend the night with her after—"

"I didn't do anything."

They all gaped at him wordlessly. He gaped back.

It was Hook who broke the silence. "You know, dude, they make pills for that kind of problem now."

Flynn glared. "Knock it off with the wise-ass comments, will you? All of you. This is serious."

Hook sighed. "Serious, huh? Didn't know you had it in ya. But all right, you bring her along. Give her the thrill ride of her life. Talk to her all day. You both develop a thing for each other, but you're all of a sudden infected with the gentleman bug, so you sit up there and, I'm gonna guess, make out and talk some more, but you don't do anything else."

"Girls like that," Bignose put in.

"So no harm, no foul. What's the problem?"

"She said she was _falling in love with me,"_ he groaned.

The rest of the team stared at him, clearly appalled. However, Flynn did not think that they were appalled at the fact that she had said this. The disapproval was definitely directed at _him_.

It was Bignose who spoke. "And what're _you_ saying? That you don't care about her? That the whole day has been a lie?" He stood up menacingly. "Is that what the problem is?"

"I—" He cleared his throat. "No, I _do _care about her. I wanted to go out with her once we got back. She was going to move out of that place in the swamp. But this is crazy! Who says something like that after _one day _of knowing somebody?" He knew he was trying to blame her for this to make himself feel better, but it was not working.

Bignose shrugged. "Come on, man. We've been watching you two—well, listening—all day. It's obvious. When you find the right person, you just _know._ You can talk with her and run on for hours and it's like you've known each other for your whole lives."

"That's fairy-tale bullshit! Things like that don't happen." _Hear that? They don't happen, _he told himself in thought. _This is not happening._

"Yes, they do. Not that often, but they do."

He put his head in his hands. "I can't _deal _with this," he exclaimed. "This is insane! This is crazier than anything I've ever done."

The other chasers stared at him. "You _are_ fucked up, Rider," Bignose finally said. "You're so scared to get attached to anyone, so afraid they'll be taken away from you, that you'll destroy them yourself first just so you can feel like you're in control."

Ouch. That hurt, not least because it hit so close to the truth. "I don't want to destroy her," he protested.

"But if you skip out on her now, you will," Bignose said. "Is that what you want?"

"No," he said. He looked up and glared at the team. "I don't know what I want, all right? I thought I did, but I don't anymore."

"Get out of here," Vladimir snarled. "Go back upstairs where you belong and go to sleep. You've been up too long and you're not thinking straight."

"I'm _fine._ Look, there's something about this that none of you know." He took a deep breath. "I didn't even want to take her along at first, but she offered me something—something she had invented—something very valuable for _our _research. She has no idea just _how _valuable."

"What do you mean?" Attila asked.

"You know the problem with the soil being churned up? She's got a better idea for taking measurements, and it will work. And I accepted her offer to give me this design in exchange for taking her along. I was going to _steal _her design."

"Rider, stop talking _now,"_ Hook muttered, glancing toward the entrance to the bar.

"What? No, you're going to listen to me. This is important." Now that he had begun to spill, he was not about to be stopped. "She agreed to a deal, but she doesn't know what she has. I was going to take her back to the cabin, present the design to the Koenigs as my idea, and bribe my way back into the laboratory." He looked miserably at the hook-handed chaser.

"Eugene!"

Flynn snapped his head around toward the entrance to the bar. Rapunzel was standing in the doorway, her clothes rumpled and her hair mussed. His breath caught at the sight. What was he _thinking_, running off to the bar in fear of something that should have made him happy? The guys were right. Suddenly he decided that he wasn't going to be scared of this. He would 'fess up to her about misleading her, apologize, and take her to the laboratory _with him_.

The dream that had suddenly formed in his mind shattered to pieces as he registered the look of disbelief and fury that she was giving him. "What do you mean, _bribe your way_ _back into the laboratory?"_ she said dangerously.

"I told you to stop talking," Hook muttered.

"You got sacked, didn't you? Before you met me."

"Rapunzel..."

"No!" She stormed over to the bar and pointed a finger directly in his face. "You _lied_ to me, and not just about your so-called job! You told me you _cared _about me, when you were just going to ditch me and pawn off my idea as _yours _to get hired again! And to think that I let you kiss me and manhandle me! I guess you just wanted to get off, and I was there! Ugh!" She shuddered.

"Rapunzel, it's not like that!" Her look of disgust was breaking him apart far more than anything she said. He knew that words could be used insincerely as weapons; he did it enough himself, but that _look..._

"Yeah, you didn't hear him earlier," Hook said, trying to stop this before it got any worse.

"Yes, it is like that, _Flynn!"_ The name sounded like an indictment. "You're nothing but a self-centered _jerk _who _uses _other people, just like Mother warned me about! Just like people did to _her!_ I've had warnings all day and I was so _stupid_ not to see what an _ass _you are!"

He winced. "Rapunzel, stop talking like this."

"Don't you tell me what to do, Eugene, Flynn, or whatever your name really is! I'm finished with you! I'm going home!"

That protective feeling reared up inside him. "You can't go out in this. It's dark, you live in the middle of a damned _swamp, _and there are still storms around."

"I can do whatever I want, and why do you care? The sensors are locked in your car. That's all you want anyway." She stared at him, an ugly snarl on her beautiful face.

"That is _not _all I want and you know it."

They stared each other down for a few seconds before rushing at each other, out of anger in her case, desire and protectiveness in his. She lunged at him. He tried to back away, but the palm of her hand connected with his cheek with a vicious slap. He was angry now too, but he had never struck someone smaller than himself and he never would. She'd get something else, something that would _make _her see what she was denying in anger. He wasn't going to have her denying it now that _he _had admitted it to himself.

He pinned her arms against her sides and planted his lips against hers. She squirmed at first, but perhaps her body still wanted him, because she did not fight him as he kissed her with incredible ferocity. For a moment there was nothing but the heat and their tongues and their heavy breathing. Panting, they broke away and stared at each other. An expression of total astonishment spread over her face. She began to flush pink and smile faintly.

Relief washed over him at this reaction. Apparently the old Flynn Rider tricks could still save him in a bad situation. Not that he didn't _mean _that kiss with every ounce that he poured into it, but it was good to know that it would also have the effect that he wanted. She was his again; he was sure of it. He gave her a satisfied smirk.

At the sight of this, her expression changed, twisting rapidly into something revolted and outraged. As he realized what she was thinking, his face fell. He opened his mouth to say something—he wasn't sure what, but _anything _to explain that this wasn't what she thought it was—but he never got the chance. Before he could even register what she was doing, she picked up Hook's beer bottle by the neck and smashed it over his head.

A crash of glass and a cry of pain split the air. Stars seemed to pop before his eyes, and he felt woozy. As the other chasers converged on him in concern, she dashed for the doorway. The last thing he saw before blacking out was her running out of the bar and into the hotel lobby.

* * *

><p>"Rapunzel," Flynn mumbled as he drifted in and out. "Rapunzel, no. No." His eyes suddenly fluttered open. "Where is she?" he cried in alarm, but immediately he noticed that their attention was fixed on the panel of windows. What had formerly been a stiff breeze was now a gale. That brought him back to full alertness. He blinked, got off the bar stool, and went over to the window to look outside.<p>

The wind blew fiercely across the back parking lot, blowing leaves, twigs... a piece of sheet metal... a battered purple cushion...

The same thought had entered their minds at once. Together they dashed out the glass door that led to the outside and gazed up to the sky. An unearthly roar was in the wind. A lightweight branch fell from the sky in front of the group. A bolt of lightning struck in the distance, lighting up the sky beneath the cloud for a millisecond and revealing a swirling wedge-like shape. Flynn felt as if a rock had dropped into his stomach.

"We've got to get to the vehicles!" Vladimir shouted.

Flynn's face was contorted in dismay. "It's too late!" he cried. "It's almost here!"

They dashed back into the bar, continued through the entrance to the motel, and ran up to the front desk. "Get everyone out of their rooms!" Hook called.

"They're better off in them," the clerk said nervously. "There's no inside hallway."

Flynn lunged over the desk and grabbed the clerk by his shirt. "How many people are on the second floor?" he snarled. "Tell me!"

The clerk was shocked by the violence. "Ten rooms are occupied," he said shakily. "What do you think you're going to do?"

Flynn was already heading for the front door. "We're going to get those people out of there and into this lobby." The five team members followed him.

They ran up the metal stairs as the tornado approached. The wind was full of small debris now, whistling around their ears. They shielded their eyes. "It's coming from the west-southwest," Flynn said. "Through the swamp. It might _just _miss... it'll be close."

The team split up and beat loudly on all the doors, nine of them opening in response. The occupants hurried out of their rooms downstairs into the lobby. Flynn wondered about the tenth room, when it hit him—that was Rapunzel's room. He had a key. He dashed over to the door, stuck the key in the door, and burst into the dark room.

"Rapunzel, you've got to get out!" he cried, turning on the lights. He glanced around. She was not there.

"Rapunzel!" He ran over to the bathroom. The door was ajar. _"Rapunzel!"_ He was panicking now.

A sudden thud. He looked out the open door and saw a battered piece of furniture fly by. There was nothing he could do. He grabbed the cardboard box containing Pascal and ran for it.

The tornado was right there. The winds were easily hurricane force now. Flynn stumbled down the metal stairs, fighting to stand up and keep his footing, dodging a piece of sheet metal that could have decapitated him. He dashed into the lobby with the box. It was now full of people, not just from the second floor. They were huddled, terrified. Several of them whimpered. The room was crowded, and he could not tell if Rapunzel was among them. He hunkered down behind a chair, grabbing the seat cushion out of it and holding it in front of himself to shield his body from flying debris.

A horrific crash began to sound, and it continued, growing into a deafening roar that just kept going. Someone in the lobby began to scream. The windows shattered, throwing bits of glass into the lobby. A panel of the ceiling crashed to the floor, breaking in half across a coffee table in a cloud of dust. Flynn sneaked a peek around his cushion to look up at that spot. It afforded a direct view of the wind. There did not appear to _be _a second floor anymore above that point. The roar continued as the tornado passed. The lobby floor became coated with gravel, bits of asphalt, pieces of leaves, and unidentifiable bits of debris. A coating of drywall dust settled over all of it.

Finally it stopped. The lobby occupants slowly stood up, emerging from their hiding places, looking around.

The first person to break down was a middle-aged woman who happened to be standing near Attila. She took one look at the hole in the roof and fainted—fortunately being grabbed by him before she could hit the floor. Several other people began to whimper and cry.

Flynn was unharmed, and it appeared that everyone in the lobby had come out all right. The tornado had not made a direct hit on the Duck Motel, but it was a very close call. He threw aside the cushion and stood up.

"Rapunzel!" he called out.

No one responded. Several people blinked at him, looking shell-shocked.

A weight settled in his stomach. "Rapunzel, are you here?"

No response. Before any of his team could protest or try to stop him, he dashed out into the night.

"Rapunzel!" he yelled. "Rapunzel!" He ran out of the wreckage, looking around. The streetlights were broken and darkened. The entire second level of the motel was destroyed. They had probably saved the lives of everyone who had been there. The first floor was mostly intact, and several doors were opening, the rooms' shocked occupants gaping at the damage. Off in the near distance, the swamp was torn up, trees snapped in half and debarked, and debris was scattered everywhere. The storm had cut right through the swamp. But Eugene was thinking of only one thing.

"Rapunzel, I'm sorry about everything! Please answer me!" he called again. It echoed back to him mockingly... _answer me... answer me... answer me..._

He swayed and fell to his knees. A flashback suddenly entered his mind: the image of an eight-year-old boy calling out for his parents amidst a field of debris. Parents who weren't going to answer. At least that time, it hadn't been _his_ fault. If he had only stayed with her instead of freaking out, then he wouldn't have had the chance for heroism, but he would have her in his arms right now in the lobby with everyone else, instead of being out here in this war zone calling for her and hoping against hope for an answer.

"_Rapunzel, please!"_

Silence.

There had been silence eighteen years ago when the little boy fell to the ground at the realization of the hideous glaring truth. Met with silence again, the adult miserably grabbed a handful of gravel and let it fall out of his hands. It just couldn't be. He wouldn't think it. He would not. But he couldn't stop himself. The image of her beautiful young body, battered and lifeless, filled his traitorous mind against his will. She had run out here angry at him, not knowing what he really felt, thinking he didn't care and only wanted to use her. Had she—he swallowed a lump—_died_ thinking that?

"_Rapunzel!"_

Still nothing. Finally he lost it.

"No! Oh, please, _no!"_ he shouted in agony. There was still no response, and that awful silence was like a dagger through his faltering hopes. No one would be so cruel as to not respond to _that, _if they _could_ respond, and certainly not Rapunzel. Eugene collapsed completely to the ground and, for the first time in eighteen years, sobbed.


	12. Catastrophe

**Author's Note:** Viewpoint switch. Here is what happened to Rapunzel after she smashed the bottle over his head.

Penguinator27: Yes, there was supposed to be an M-rated scene in the previous chapter. I simply could not make myself go there with this story. And for the abuse, I meant the violent rush/slap/kiss/hit at the end of the argument. I just know that some people can be very sensitive about that kind of thing.

**WARNING****:** Violence, attempted rape, dark content.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 12: Catastrophe<strong>

* * *

><p>Rapunzel's thoughts were a blur as she ran from the motel lounge. She could not believe what she had just done. It was one thing to use an iron skillet to knock out somebody who had trespassed in her house. That was self-defense. It was completely different to slap and smash a bottle over the head of someone who wasn't threatening her, and for whom—she hated to admit it now—she had feelings. The law called that assault, she was pretty sure. She did not know much about the law, but when Eugene—Flynn—<em>ugh, whatever<em>—had talked about being abducted by those big thugs, he had said that he was assaulted by them. He was punched in the gut and hit in the head. This was surely no different. She felt sick and ashamed of herself. One of the first things she did upon going out into the wide world was to turn violent. _What if it's not just that other people are dangerous to me?_ she thought. _What if, in order to protect myself against bad people, I have to turn just as bad?_

_Eugene's not bad,_ a competing thought seemed to whisper. To Rapunzel, this voice seemed to have the hiss of a snake, if snakes could talk.

_Yes, he is. He stole your idea. He's a liar and a manipulator._

_He sure was protesting that. "That's not all I want and you know it." That's what he said. You never let him say anything else._

_It was just a lie too. That kiss was definitely a lie._

_You sure?_

She tried to silence the argument going on in her head. Whatever he may have thought then, there could be little doubt of what he thought of her now. She had to put him behind her. There were more important things to worry about right now—namely, getting out of that place before Eugene or those big powerful men came after her to hold her for arrest for what she'd done. Her heart was pounding, the thumps seeming to echo in her ears with every slam of her boots—no, her _mother's_ boots—against the floor. Tears sprang to her eyes as she dashed through the entrance and into the north parking lot. She blinked, stopped, caught her breath, and gazed around the lot. The three vehicles for the storm chasers she had spent her day with were still parked where they had last been left. _Of course,_ she thought. _No one would have a reason to move them._

As she stood there, calming her thoughts, one emotion surfaced out of the swirling confused mass: anger. Before she called out to him in the bar, he had owned up to intending to steal her sensors at first. And he _absolutely _had lied to her about his job. There was _no _doubt about that. Why should she trust him again even if he had supposedly changed his mind? _Mother always said that people didn't really change, and if it ever appeared that they did, it was just a game they played to try to suck you into their web. _While imparting this lesson, she had even gestured to a spider's web in the corner, which had a harmless moth ensnared by the large hairy spider. The spider actually crawled over to the moth and began to feed on it as her mother spoke. Rapunzel hadn't wanted to watch this, but her mother had forced her to observe the entire meal until the spider crawled away, satisfied, leaving the moth dead and drained. It gave her nightmares for weeks, but she got the point.

Well, she was not going to be anyone's prey. She'd learned her lesson. Rapunzel gave a final glare to the white Mustang, sniffed contemptuously, turned her back on it, and walked away, heading in the direction of the swamp. As she passed through the parking lot on the south side of the motel, some movement in the corner of one of her eyes caught her attention. She swiveled on her heels and looked in the direction of the motion. It seemed to be coming from near a black pickup truck. A bolt of recognition suddenly hit her. This was the truck that those thugs who had tried to kill Eugene drove. She gazed into the back of it. The silver cylinder, identical to his design, stood upright in it, confirming her guess.

"Hey," came a brutal voice from the other side of the truck. She stood rooted to the ground as the pair of thugs walked lazily around the vehicle to leer at her.

She had _nothing _now. No frying pan, no bottle, nothing. She did the only thing she could do. She ran. She ran as hard as she could for the swamp. She heard them following her, but she kept running. And then she felt a sensation of horrible pain as the braid in her hair—the braid _he had put there,_ she thought in misery—was yanked by something. That something turned out to be the hand of one of the thugs. Her hair was so long that it flew out behind her in this wind.

This was her worst nightmare come true. She tried not to think about what was happening as one of the thugs pinned her arms and clapped a hand over her mouth, and the other grabbed her braid and sadistically yanked it. She would not cooperate, at least. She would not walk. Her mother's boots scraped against the asphalt as they dragged her toward their truck. The doors were thrown open and she was flung into the back seat. The thugs got in behind her and slammed the doors shut.

"What's the problem?" one of them asked, leering at her. "You spent all day giving it away to Rider's team, didn't ya? What's a little more?" He hiked up her skirt and dragged an atrocious hand up her calf.

She felt like throwing up. But maybe—a tiny, faint hope entered her mind at the thought—_maybe _if they were just jealous of Eugene and the others, believing that she had been trading her body for a storm chase, then they would stop this once they knew differently. "I _didn't!"_ she cried. "I didn't do _anything!_ It was the sensors."

They had apparently been expecting her to protest what they were doing, but this comment was something that threw them for a loop. "Sensors? What the hell?" the other thug said.

She glanced toward the door. Eugene had escaped these criminals once before. She could surely do it too. She just had to get them away from her. "I gave him a design for sensors," she said with a gulp. "That's all."

"Lying bitch. I saw Rider manhandling you in that field," the other thug, the one that had already assaulted her, growled. He pushed her down and smacked her in the face. As he got close up to her, she realized that this was the one who had the broken nose. His breath stank of alcohol. She tried kicking the thugs, but to no avail. The other thug grabbed her ankles.

"It wasn't a... a transaction," she whimpered. "And nobody else touched me."

"Oh, so it was just you and him, huh? Even better. That bastard did this to my nose, slut. I think I'll take it out on _you."_

_WHAT?_ she screamed in thought. Rapunzel felt, if it were possible, even sicker. He'd never mentioned _that _to her. He was violent too. Everyone was violent in the outside world.

"You want front or back first?" the other one said evilly.

As the thug sneered out this horrible question, Rapunzel tried one last time to escape. She put every bit of energy she had into her struggle, kicking as hard as she could against the thug's grip on her legs, trying to butt her head against the other thug's broken nose, even trying to break a window. She screamed as loudly as she could for help. Surely somebody would hear her. The truck couldn't be soundproof.

Then a gust of fresh air swept through the truck. A thump sounded, and the thug with the broken nose was grabbed and hurled backward, his eyes rolling back in his head. The other one was startled, loosening his grip on her ankles, and Rapunzel took advantage of this to break free and kick him in the face. She made to dash out the door into the arms of whoever had rescued her. Her first thought was that one of the storm chasers had come after her. As she jumped up, however, she was astonished to find herself looking into a pair of gray eyes that she knew very, very well.

"_YOU!"_ the other thug, the one who was still conscious, glared in unmitigated fury at Gothel. "You said we could do what we wanted—" He was cut off with another thump, and Rapunzel noticed that Gothel was carrying a piece of pipe.

"Mother," she whispered, looking at the thugs, then at the woman before her. "Mother."

"Dear," the older woman simpered, holding out her arms, but Rapunzel did not walk any closer.

"What was he saying?" she said in a taut voice. Her eyes were wide in horror.

"Oh, dear, surely you aren't going to believe the words of a criminal," she said sweetly. "Come here, flower."

Rapunzel backed away. "Were you _working _with them?" she gasped in disbelief.

The second thug had not been hit very hard, apparently, for he had awakened again. "So we thought—" he began to growl before Gothel whacked him in the back of the head much harder this time. She turned to Rapunzel, the fear of discovery very clearly written in her face, confirming the words without speaking. Rapunzel felt her heart break for the second time that night.

"Mother, how _could _you?" She was at the point of bursting into tears. Was there _no one _she could trust?

"I would _never _have let them actually harm you," she said, reaching out a hand to pat the young woman.

Rapunzel grabbed the arm and hurled the older woman away. Gothel stumbled in the wind, which seemed to be increasing, but neither of them paid any attention to that. "What if you hadn't gotten here in time?" she shouted, her voice much louder and more shrill than it would normally be. She was very shaken up by what had just happened to her. "What if they were too strong for you?" That emotion of anger was surfacing again. "All this time, you warned me about how bad people were, when you're just as bad!"

"People _are_ bad," Gothel said darkly, looking at the thugs. "You have to meet them on their own terms."

That was exactly what Rapunzel had been thinking about _herself _earlier, and it revolted her. That her mother would embrace darkness so casually made her feel ill. And also—

"You didn't have to do a deal with them!" she screamed. "Are you saying _I'm_ the bad one? That you had to meet _me _on my own terms?"

Gothel glared at her. "You disobeyed me most flagrantly, taking up with a group of men and going on a joyride with them. But you are right, dear," she said with an evil laugh as Rapunzel's face contorted in disgust and outrage. "It seems that you have learned on your own what happens. What are you doing outside? Discarded like an old dish rag after those men you spent the day with were finished using you?" Her lip curled in disgust.

"Nobody _used _me like _you _think!" she cried. "Only one of them even touched me, and I thought he liked me." She wanted to cry at the thought of this.

Gothel laughed nastily. "I could have told you otherwise. Of course he didn't like you. He was probably laughing at you the whole time and you were just too naïve to notice it, but I suppose you've learned a lesson. You're going home, Rapunzel. But first, you're helping me tie up and lock these two in their truck, so they won't follow us." She held up a set of keys, which obviously belonged to one of the thugs.

"No! I'm not going back with you! You can do it yourself!" The wind was definitely picking up. Rapunzel was starting to feel particles of dust or dirt strike her in the face.

"Where do you think you'll go?" Gothel's voice was icy cold and arrogant. There was a tiny hint of Eugene in it, so it seemed to Rapunzel, but _his _cockiness was somehow warmer and more teasing. This was different.

"I'm going to the city to get a job," she said. "Go back to the swamp, Mother. Live however you want. But I'm leaving home and I'm _not _coming back." She turned and ran as hard as she could for the north side of the motel, not looking back. The wind was really getting up, and she was struggling to stay on her feet, but she did not think about what that could mean on a day like this. Her mind was in too much turmoil. Eugene's betrayal, her attack on him, that _kiss—_which still left her mind reeling—the assault and attempted rape that she had just escaped, her mother's betrayal—she could barely stand it. She was not even sure where she was going or what her plan was. She didn't have a key to the motel room, although—she realized with a jolt—she had left Pascal in there. _How could I have abandoned him? I'm a bad person, _she thought miserably. The tears that she had been holding back suddenly gushed out of her eyes. It was too much. Everything was too much.

She couldn't go back to the storm chase team. They had not come after her, after all—not that she blamed them. She felt worthless and ashamed. If she did return, she knew she would be expected to apologize. At this thought, anger flared up in her again. She didn't owe _him _an apology. _He _was the one who had lied and misled her, pretending that he was altruistically going to take her sensors to the lab and help her, when in reality he was planning to get rid of her and take credit for the sensors himself. The last words he had spoken to her flitted into her brain again, though, and she found herself doubting her own angry convictions. What if he _had _been telling the truth? But no, it didn't matter. She had slapped him and hit him on the head. Even if he had cared for her after all, he surely wouldn't now.

Her thoughts about the storm chasers, and Eugene in particular, were far too confusing to sort out right now. She had to think about something more practical. That brought her back to the present reality and her situation. _Where in the world can I GO?_ she screamed in thought. _I have to get to the city, but how? Mother won't take me, even if I could still trust her. I don't have any way of getting there myself except walking. And I still have to get Pascal back._ The thought of her pet being abandoned—and she _knew _perfectly well that Eugene did not like the snake—settled the matter. He would probably take the first opportunity to release him into the wild. Pascal might find his own way back to her, but then, she had abandoned him, so he might not. She really had no other option but to go back to the group. That did not, however, mean that she had to depend on Eugene to escort her into town. He wasn't even employed at the lab anymore. They didn't have to take orders from him. Maybe she could persuade one of the other guys to let her ride with them.

As she rounded the corner of the motel and entered the side parking lot, she noticed something odd. The wind was swirling around in a great arc, and there appeared to be things in it. She stopped on a dime and suddenly realized that she could hardly stand, the wind was so fierce. She glanced at the sky. A bolt of lightning struck, illuminating the horizon for a brief moment and making a vast shadow visible that reached from the base of the cloud to the ground. It was very, very close. This tornado was unlike anything she had seen that day. It was unlike any tornado she had ever seen from the treetops. It was a beast. She gasped in terror.

A branch fell to the ground in front of her, coated with ice. It had apparently been pulled high into the storm. The layer of ice shattered upon impact with the asphalt, taking several leaves off with it as if they were made of stained glass. Rapunzel looked directly up and saw more things in the air that simply should not be there. Pieces of torn paper, cardboard boxes, roof shingles, and lots of leaves were blowing around. Several lightweight, leafy branches were drifting downward almost gracefully. She did not waste any more time or wait for something to strike her. She ran, stumbling as a ferocious gust of wind nearly knocked her over.

The tornado threw a piece of _something_—it looked like building materials—in her path. She could not move out of the way fast enough, compelled by her own inertia to smash right into it. She tumbled over the debris as it caught between her legs, tripping her, bruising and scraping her legs. She felt her skirt rip and fell to the ground helpless. Then the storm actually picked her up along with the shattered, splintered piece of plywood.

She could hardly see what was going on around her. Pieces of wood, fragments of glass and rock, and other things that she did not even want to know about battered her. The wind was full of tiny debris, which seemed to blast into her skin like pinpricks. Flashes of light lit up the air around her as the tornado blew out the transformers on the power poles near the motel. Everything seemed to be blurring together in a kind of nightmarish painting of dark shapes. Rapunzel squinted her eyes to protect them and curled her arms around her knees, hoping that this would at least be over soon.

She hit the ground again, her skirt ripping more, asphalt scraping her skin. She could tell through her squint that she was being dragged across the side parking lot by the wind. There was a slam and a crushing, aching pain in her left side. She had been flung against the brick wall of the motel. She looked out again, opening her eyes—her mind had somehow leaped to the conclusion that if she was no longer airborne, then perhaps the tornado was weaker now or it had almost passed—when she noticed it. A big piece of sheet metal roofing was falling, seemingly in slow motion, above her. Her heart skipped a beat. There was no time to get up and run, though, and her legs were too scraped and battered. She tried to crawl out of the path but was not fast enough. The piece of metal crashed to the ground, completely covering her body.

Pain. Crushing, full-body pain. She felt that her entire body had been smashed into the pavement. Even her toes seemed to ache, and in a fraction of a second, she supposed that this had to actually be a good thing because it meant that she was not paralyzed. Yet there was so much pain. She couldn't take the pain anymore. Her vision faded. _"Eugene,"_ she whispered. _Why did I say that? Why did I think of him?_ she thought briefly, and then she blacked out.

* * *

><p>The Corona Severe Storms Research Laboratory team trudged grimly through the parking lot, afraid of what they were going to find. None of them wanted to admit it to one another, but they could not see how Rapunzel could possibly have survived this if she had been outside. They were expecting to find a corpse, and they knew that <em>they <em>had to be the ones to find her body first, _not _Flynn. There was no doubt in any of their minds what he felt for her.

"There's somebody on the ground right there," Bignose called out, pointing. As they drew nearer, he sighed. "Oh, it's Rider. You okay?" he asked Flynn, who was still lying prone on the parking lot and sobbing into his own arms. Bignose was not sure he wanted to know the answer. If he had already found her body...

"No, I am not okay!" Flynn roared, sitting up. He glared at them and wiped his eyes, clearly embarrassed that they had seen this.

"Did you find her?" Hook said in a flat tone.

"No!"

The others exchanged glances. "We're looking for her," Hook said. "Come on. Get up." He heaved Flynn up by his shoulders. Flynn began walking with the others, but there was something mechanical about it.

"I called out to her," he said brokenly. "She never answered."

"People can get knocked out," Vladimir said, trying to inject a little hope into the situation. "We'll have to search everything manually."

The north parking lot had been on the outside edge of the tornado's circulation. The vehicles in it had been moved somewhat and had taken hits from debris, but there was not that much major damage to them. The Mustang was covered in dirt again, and the side windows were now nicked as well as the front. The van had been pushed against a tree, which had put a dent in the left side, but otherwise it was in decent shape. The unicorn truck had barely moved.

"Well, at least they weren't totaled," Vladimir remarked gruffly as they passed the vehicles. "Come on. I don't think she'll be in this lot." They turned the corner and began walking down the side lot of the motel.

Flynn suddenly noticed a very strange piece of debris in front of him. "Wait," he said, stooping down to get a closer look. It was a broken piece of sheetrock no bigger than the size of a sheet of paper, but it had an unusual paint job. The wall had been purple, apparently. And there was—_oh no, _he thought with a turn of his stomach. The piece of wall bore the hand-painted design of an art deco-style girl with long yellow hair.

"What's that?" Hook asked.

"I know what it is, but it doesn't matter right now," Flynn said, stashing it into his satchel. "Come on. We've got to find her."

Vladimir had broken away from the group and was pulling aside a big piece of metal roofing that had fallen right next to the brick wall of the motel. It appeared to be covering up a pile of debris on the ground. Flynn gazed in the direction of the large man and suddenly saw it. A pale white hand extended from beneath the piece of metal. He let out a cry and broke into a sprint.

"No, Rider!" Immediately he felt himself pinned by Hook and the others, then swerved around to face the other direction as they carried him over to where Vladimir stooped.

"Let me _go!"_ he shouted, struggling against the confines, but it was no use. He was fighting against four men who were all bigger than he was.

Gingerly Vladimir lifted the piece of sheet metal off the ground. Rapunzel lay on the ground, scratches and bruises covering her arms and legs. Her skirt was ripped and torn, and her camisole top had one broken strap now. Her eyes were closed. Vladimir bent over and felt her wrist for a pulse.

"She's alive," Vladimir said. "Let him down." At that, the others let go of Flynn. He dashed toward the battered figure and carefully took her into his arms, looking her over to make sure that there were no signs of paralysis, broken bones, or major head injury.

"Rapunzel," he whispered to her. "Rapunzel, please wake up." He stroked her cheek, brushing away dirt.

Her eyes fluttered open at the touch. "Eugene," she mumbled.

He breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh, Rapunzel. Are you okay?"

She whimpered. "No," she said. "I hurt."

"Where do you hurt?"

A tear trickled down her face. "Everywhere."

He stood up, holding her. She was surprisingly light. "Do you feel like anything's broken?"

She paused. "No," she said. "I'm just bruised and scratched all over."

"Can you see all right?"

"Mmm-hmm." She leaned against him.

"You remember what happened?"

At this question, she gazed into his face and burst into tears. "Eugene," she cried. "I'm so sorry!"

He felt awful. What was _she _apologizing for? "No, I'm sorry. It's my fault."

"I ran into those thugs—they attacked me—"

A knot formed in his stomach. He knew what the Stabbingtons were capable of. If they had laid a hand on her— "What did they do to you?" he said, anger seeping out of his voice.

"They hauled me into their truck"—she gulped down a hiccup—"and they tried to... to..." She couldn't finish.

It was not necessary. Everyone there understood. Expressions of horror came over the faces of the large men. Several of them clenched their fists, and Flynn felt nothing but raw, visceral hatred for these despicable thugs. "Did they?" he said.

"No, my mother stopped them. Eugene," she said, looking him in the eye with clear anguish, "she was _with them! She put them up to it!"_

He went numb. "No," he gasped. "I... Rapunzel. What have I _done?"_

"You didn't do it," she sobbed. "I should've given you a chance to talk. But then after _she _showed up, we fought, and I ran away, and then the storm came." She buried her face against his jacket.

He sank to the ground, still holding her, and let her cry against his chest while he stroked the back of her head. "Go ahead," he said softly, nuzzling her head. "Go ahead and cry, sweetheart. I've been crying for you."

"You have?" Her voice was muffled.

"I have. Rapunzel, I care about you. Please don't think that was a lie." He was pleading, and she heard desperation in his voice that could mean only one thing.

"I know," she whispered. "I was mad."

"You're all right now. I've got you, and I'm not going to let anything like that happen to you again. It's going to be all right." He could not yet bring himself to tell her about the contents of his satchel or what it meant. She had suffered too much in a brief time already.

* * *

><p><strong>Note:<strong> I've got mixed feelings about the attack in this chapter. For years I've complained about gratuitous rape in fanfic, and now I've written an assault in one myself. I suppose it _was_ planned and foreseen from the outset, it was in-character (rather than a decent character doing it), and I honestly do think that the subtext is there in the attack sequence in _Tangled,_ but still... I deliberately kept it from being too graphic because the subject matter is very sensitive to a lot of people, and to be honest, I don't like writing such things anyway.

This chapter was originally supposed to end with Rapunzel falling unconscious, but there are only two more full chapters and an epilogue left, and I needed to keep things going to tell the rest of the story. I'm also feeling compassionate tonight and decided that _two _cliffhangers in a row might be a bit too sadistic. Of course, it's very obvious what else has happened...


	13. Revelations

**Author's Note:** Sorry about the delay. I managed to get chapter 12 out faster than I'd expected, but then the life/school stuff that I was sure would interfere with 12 actually interfered with this chapter. There's not a lot of action in this chapter, but there are several unresolved issues that need to be addressed before the big finale and the epilogue.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 13: Revelations<strong>

* * *

><p>The team left Eugene and Rapunzel to themselves while they returned to the motel to see if their assistance was needed. He decided that she would do better with something comfortable to rest on, so he carried her to the north parking lot and put her in the back seat of his car, holding her in his lap the whole time. When Rapunzel remembered why she had run back to the motel in the first place—to get her pet snake—she started shaking and asked, brokenly and somewhat incoherently, if Pascal was all right. Eugene assured her that he had taken the snake out of her room before the tornado swiped the motel and showed her the animal curled up snugly in its box. The team had put the box in the back of Hook's van. With a cry of happiness, she threw her arms around his neck in gratitude that he did not think he deserved.<p>

"Rapunzel," he said as she took the python out of its box, brought it back into Eugene's car, and let it curl around her injured legs.

"Hmm?" She was becoming calm again now that she had her pet with her and she was with Eugene again. She had stopped crying, and she was taking deep breaths and curling against him whenever she started to shake uncontrollably. The closeness seemed to comfort her and make the trembling stop.

He took a deep breath. He hated having to say anything that might upset her again, but he knew he did not deserve to be let off the hook for behaving like an ass just because he had held her and whispered comforting words. Given the circumstances, that was _expected, _and any normal person would have done it. He had to address what had made her run out of the motel in the first place, because if he didn't do it now, she would remember it eventually. It could not be put off forever.

"I wanted to tell you, I'm sorry about everything that happened. When I offered to take you along, I admit I _did _have a plan in mind of taking credit for your idea, but as soon as I got to know you, I felt guilty about it. I definitely changed my mind when you started talking about your future plans and how you wanted to get a job at the lab. I want that for you, and you deserve it. I freaked out when you said you were falling for me, because it made me realize I felt the same way, and I was terrified of what would happen if you found out I'd lied so much." The words seemed to tumble out of his mouth, but he knew that it would be better—and easier—to get this done at once.

"Really? You _really _feel the same way?" She had apparently focused on that one thing. Her eyes were wide and sparkling with hope.

"Yes."

"Oh, Eugene," she said with feeling, hugging him.

"I was afraid, and I didn't know how to fix the mess I'd made of everything. That's why I left the room. When you walked in and heard me—" He took a breath. It was not easy to speak about what had happened in the lounge. "When you heard that, I realize it must have sounded pretty bad. But I wasn't boasting. I was confessing how much I'd screwed everything up."

She regarded him contemplatively. "I'm sorry too," she said quietly. "I should have listened to you rather than hitting you."

"Well, I wasn't exactly presenting myself as the most upright or honorable person in the world, forcing the kind of kiss on you that I did and then smirking about it like an arrogant jerk."

She frowned at that memory. "Right. Now, about that—"

"I didn't just do it to manipulate your emotions," he pleaded.

"But that was part of it?" She raised an eyebrow at him.

"Maybe." He smirked in spite of himself. "But it was to manipulate you into liking me again so that we could be together, not so that I could run off with your inventions. Besides, if you look very honestly at the matter, relationships are nothing more than people manipulating each other's emotions."

Her jaw dropped open. "Eugene, that is the most cynical thing I think I've ever heard."

"But true."

"I suppose if you want to call it _manipulation_ to be affectionate and kind to the person you love because you want to be with them..." She trailed off when she noticed that he was about to burst out laughing. "Wait, you're not serious?"

He pulled her closer and kissed her forehead. "Maybe, maybe not, Blondie."

"You're impossible," she said with a laugh. That and the smile on her face made him feel warm from head to toe.

* * *

><p>The team emerged from the motel again as a group, carrying the few personal possessions that they had brought inside. "Hey," Hook called out as they approached the pair that were embracing in the back of the white Mustang with the doors wide open.<p>

"That was quick," Eugene said.

"They don't really need us. Apparently emergency vehicles are almost here." The motel was a significant distance from the city, but even as Hook finished his sentence, vehicles with flashing sirens started to show up.

"You probably need to go to the hospital," Eugene said to Rapunzel as an ambulance pulled up to take away anyone who might need medical treatment. In truth, he was not sure if she actually did, but he wanted her to be in a safe place.

She considered. She _was _pretty battered. Her legs were covered in scrapes and abrasions, and she had some nasty bruises. On the other hand, she did not _feel _that badly injured. "I saw a first aid kit in the back of the van," she said. "Do you have anything that can go on scrapes? Alcohol or something? I can't imagine that they would do anything more than that at the hospital, and I don't... I don't really want to leave," she said in a small voice.

Eugene honestly could not remember what was in the back of the van. He had not paid that much attention in the first place when he organized it, and now that so much had happened, it had completely escaped his mind. But Hook spoke up. "There's a bottle of it, yeah."

"Are you sure you don't want to go to the hospital?" Eugene asked her.

"I'm sure. I promise I'll go if I start feeling like I need to, or if something becomes infected." She grinned wryly at him, though he could tell it was becoming a strain for her to stay moderately cheerful. He _really _did not look forward to telling her about her house.

"Well, then, you'll need some other clothes to put on," he said. He opened his car door. "And I'm afraid that the only ones you stand a chance of fitting belong to the slob who's half the size of everyone else, as you put it. Though they _aren't _dirty or smelly any more." He took out the clothes that had been washed at Katrina's house, now mostly dry.

She took them and looked around. "Where can I change?"

"Back of the van," Hook said. "Don't worry; there's no windows in there."

"Want me to rub you down with the alcohol?" Eugene asked with a smirk.

She blushed. "Eugene Fitzherbert, you are incorrigible," she said haughtily, flouncing into the van and closing the doors.

Hook turned to Eugene with a raised eyebrow and a laugh written on his face. _"Why _has she been calling you that? I assumed 'Eugene' was, like, your middle name, but—"

"It's my real name," Eugene said defensively.

"You're kidding me. All this time—?"

"Since I was eight years old, yeah."

A look of dawning comprehension spread across his face. "Oh. That's why?"

"Basically. I resented the way Corona government was handling the tragedy and speaking of my parents... I didn't want them to know me for who I really was. And I didn't want to face anything that had happened to the kid with that name."

The others looked at him sympathetically. "I knew it was probably bad, the way you never wanted to talk about it, but I didn't imagine that," Bignose said.

Suddenly they all heard Rapunzel burst into tears inside the van. Eugene was not surprised. He could tell that she had been making a valiant effort to hold it in while she talked with them, but that it had been hard on her.

"Poor kid," Hook remarked. "What kind of mother would do that, anyway?"

"That's not all the woman has done to her through the years. Her mother is sick in the head," Eugene said with anger in his voice. "If she hadn't decided on her own to leave, I'd do everything I could to persuade her."

"Well, then, are we going to help her move her stuff out?"

Eugene gave a dark look to the team. He spoke in a low voice. "I don't think there's anything to move out."

Their eyes widened in horror. "You don't mean..." Vladimir began before trailing off. He looked toward the damage path that the tornado had cut through the swamp, then at Eugene, pity filling his rough face. He would not finish the thought aloud.

Eugene looked grimly at the big chaser. "I'm afraid so." He took the piece of drywall out of his satchel and held it out. "She painted this. I don't remember this specific picture, but her whole cabin was painted with designs like this. And look at the hair."

"It's a painting of her," Hook said.

"When are you going to tell her?" Bignose asked.

Worry creased Eugene's handsome face at this prospect. "I don't know."

In about fifteen minutes, Rapunzel emerged from the van smelling of antiseptic and wearing Eugene's black t-shirt and jeans, which she had belted tightly to her waistline and cuffed to keep from dragging to the ground. He raised an eyebrow in a smirk. "Nice. They look _almost_ as sexy on you as they do on me."

Her eyes were bloodshot, and her face was obviously tear-stained, but she still managed to smile and throw a playful punch at him. "You egotistical, ungentlemanly rascal," she scolded.

He threw his hands up in defeat. "Guilty as charged," he said, but the playful teasing was starting to bother him. Her taunt hit a little too close to home. The problem was that he was, once again, keeping something very important from her, even though it was for her own emotional good this time rather than his personal benefit. _She has a right to know, and you're being dishonest with her by pretending that things are all right. You've got to do better than this, _he rebuked himself.

She seemed to have made a mental association of her own, for the expression on her face changed to something somber and apprehensive. "Eugene, there's something I wanted to know," she said.

"Oh?"

She took a deep breath. "One of the thugs had a broken nose," she said hesitantly. "He said that you did it to him. Is that true?"

He sighed and ran his hands through his hair. "It's true," he admitted. "I also cut the other one's arm with my pocket knife."

Her face fell in disappointment. "Oh, Eugene."

"I know I shouldn't have done it," he continued hurriedly. "In fact, that's why I got fired."

"It was?"

"Yeah. I attacked them in the town square in front of the entire chase team, a newspaper reporter, _and _my boss." He gave her a wry grin, and she chuckled in spite of herself. "I don't mean to excuse it, but I was so angry at them for stealing my idea—"

She grimaced. "And I reacted the same way," she said in a whisper, sounding as if she was about to burst into tears again.

"No, Rapunzel. You didn't hit me until I tried to force myself on you. You were the better person."

She sniffled and looked down.

"And there's more to it. We've got quite a history, the Stabbingtons and I. They're violent thugs, Rapunzel. You know what they're capable of. When they worked at the lab, they threatened people into going along with what they wanted on a chase, no matter what anyone else wanted or how bad of an idea it was."

"He's right," Bignose interjected. "The entire lab was glad to see them gone."

"But I know I shouldn't have done it when they hadn't been violent to me at that particular time," he said. "And if you're worried about it, I'd _never _become violent toward someone who wasn't a physical match for me. And certainly not somebody I cared about." His voice and eyes were pleading.

She sighed. "Well, I believe you about that. That didn't even cross my mind as something to worry about. I just... I don't know what I think. It sounds like they deserved it, and I'd like to hurt both of them for what they were going to do to me." Her eyes narrowed, and she clenched her fists. "It's just that I was always taught that everyone was violent, and that this was a terrible thing and a reason to avoid the world."

"I'd say violence is sometimes necessary. Maybe that's unfortunate, but it's how it is. Some people just can't be reasoned with. And besides, you didn't hesitate to use violence to defend your house against an intruder," he said with a wink.

"That's true." She sat down on next to him on the tailgate of Vladimir's truck and leaned into him. He put an arm around her waist.

"You okay now?" he asked her softly.

"I think so." She curled against him. "Eugene, if it's not too much to ask, could you and the others go back to the cabin with me when I get my stuff out of there? I'm sure _she'll _be around, and it would just make me feel safer."

Here it was. He'd hoped that more time could have passed before this came up. "Rapunzel, I—" he began brokenly, then stopped. He pulled her closer, but she could tell that something was amiss by his tone of voice.

"Eugene, what's wrong?" she asked, fear suddenly filling her voice as she pulled away from him. She stared at him, eyes wide with trepidation.

"Rapunzel, we saw a piece of wall with... with one of your golden-haired portraits on it," he said, grimacing, _really _hating to tell her explicitly that her artwork was destroyed. "I'm afraid it hit your cabin. I'm so sorry. I can't even tell you how much."

She closed her eyes. Tears started pouring silently down her face, and he felt terrible. "Rapunzel, sweetie, don't cry... I don't _know _that for certain."

"I'm sure it did if you saw my painting," she choked.

He opened his bag and wordlessly handed the fragment to her. She took it in hand, sniffled, and sobbed again. "Thank you," she whispered. "Thanks for saving it."

"We can go into the swamp later and see what else is there," he offered. "The whole team can go, just like you wanted."

"Thank you," she whispered.

"Do you... want to talk about it?" he said, blanching. He wasn't sure if he had any right to ask her that question, considering his behavior about his own tragedy _eighteen years ago,_ but he wanted to at least attempt to be as kind to her as she had been to him, now that she had the same experience.

Her eyes were wide with misery. "Eugene, I'm _homeless."_ She started sobbing in earnest, then looked up at him through a haze of tears. "But I guess I was already," she said with a wry smile playing at the corners of her mouth. "I couldn't go back and live with _her."_

He couldn't think of anything to say to that, even though he had been in this situation before. In a way, it was worse for her; his parents had died, but they _had_ loved him. He pulled her closer, hoping that he could comfort her without words.

"You saved my life," she said suddenly. "If you hadn't found the house, I would have been there when it hit." She shuddered.

That had already occurred to him, but he had pushed the thought of his mind because it made him feel cold and sick. Hearing her say it sent a shiver down his spine. He had almost not met her. _But I was chased in there,_ he thought. _Surely I shouldn't be grateful for that. And they had a vendetta against me because I assaulted them and had a history of getting them drunk and locking them up... but they deserved it for being violent bullying thugs. None of this is good. Can it really be "fate" to find her if things like that are the cause of it? Would we have met anyway even if none of it had happened?_

"Eugene, what am I going to _do?"_ she cried, interrupting his philosophical musings. He was actually quite grateful for it; this was making his head hurt.

"You're going to the lab with the team," he said firmly. "I bet you anything you'll get a job there."

"What about you?"

Eugene took a deep breath. He could not recall the last time he had made a major personal sacrifice to help somebody else, but he was going to do it now. "I don't work there, and I don't want to show up there as if I'm parading you around. I don't want the directors to be prejudiced against you because you're with me."

"But your job..."

He sighed. "Don't worry about me. I'm a survivor. Always have been. It was my own fault that I got sacked, and I'll find something. I'll have an income one way or another," he said grimly.

"But what if I can't do anything? What if nobody wants to hire me?" Rapunzel said.

"I'd be amazed if you didn't get hired at the lab, but I promise, we'll get you something to do too."

She looked up at him, green eyes wide with gratitude and affection. He smiled weakly and leaned over to give her a chaste kiss on the mouth.

"Um," Bignose suddenly said, "I really hate to even bring this up now, because I'm sure the two of you don't want to hear it, but I was looking at radar, and, well..."

Hook shrugged. "It doesn't matter. We can't take measurements."

"Yes, we can," Rapunzel spoke up. "I set up your antenna to pick up data from my sensors, and it works. We can deploy them."

"Oh?" Hook glanced at Rapunzel and Eugene. "Well, I don't know..."

"I want to do it," she said determinedly.

"If it's all right with her, it's all right with me," he said. He turned to Bignose. "So what's radar showing?"

"There's an outflow boundary forming off to the west from a storm that passed over earlier," Bignose said. "Look at this." He held out his phone to Eugene, who glanced at the radar. An arcing boundary feature was indeed evident. And behind it...

"That storm is going to explode once it hits it," Eugene said. "What's CAPE looking like out there?"

"Still awfully high for it being nighttime."

He looked at Rapunzel. "You sure about this?"

"I want to do it," she repeated with a yawn. He caught it and yawned as well.

The other chasers exchanged worried glances. "Yeah, I don't know about this," Hook said. "You've been up how long again?"

"Somebody else can drive my car," Eugene said, fishing in his bag for his keys. "Who had the least to drink at the bar earlier?"

"I only had one beer," Bignose said.

"Fine." Eugene gave the keys to him. "We really should get going." He opened the doors and climbed into the back seat with Rapunzel still in his arms. "Hey, somebody give me a pillow. I know there are some in the back of the van." He stretched out, cuddling her against himself, as Hook returned with a pillow and an expression of amusement on his face.

The caravan left the motel parking lot and began the drive west. After they had put several miles between themselves and the motel, Eugene yawned again. _As tired as I am, I'm still too wired to sleep,_ he thought. He took out his phone and navigated to radar. The storms that they were headed for were growing rapidly. He smiled and switched over to the local news to see what the storms had done in the area that day. Interestingly, there was a brand-new video about the motel. He started watching it, and to his shock, the anchor informed them that there was going to be a brief interview with the director of the storm lab, Ingrid Koenig.

"Hey, Bignose," Eugene said. "Is the radio on?"

"Yeah."

"All right." He spoke louder so that he could be heard from the back. "Guys, if you go to the news on your phones, there's a video from that motel, and Dr. Koenig's there."

"Oh, cool," came the voice of Attila over the radio.

"Dr. Koenig," the female reporter was saying in the video, "as you heard just now, the senior storm chase team from you and your husband's lab is being credited with saving the lives of everyone on the second level of this motel. To all our viewers out there, the storm chasers are not available for interview because apparently they are attempting to catch another storm now developing off to our west. But Dr. Koenig, do you have any statement to make about your lab's team and their actions tonight?"

Ingrid Koenig looked overwhelmed as she answered the reporter. "I just want to say that while I'm _very_ proud of the team's heroism, I can't say I'm too surprised. They're dedicated, considerate people, all _six_ of them, and I know that one of them had a personal experience with a devastating tornado when he was younger."

"And I'm sure that an experience like that would make one extra-sensitive to sights such as this," the reporter added, gesturing behind her to the wreckage of the motel. "Dr. Ingrid Koenig of the Corona Severe Storms Research Laboratory. Thanks for being here."

Eugene was stunned. The video continued to play, but he could not watch the rest of it. He turned to Rapunzel, who lay still against his chest.

"Eugene, did you hear that?" she asked.

He could only nod.

"Does it mean what it sounds like it means?"

"Probably," Bignose said. At this, voices of the other chasers began to crackle over the radio.

"Well, welcome back, from the sounds of it," said Hook over the airwaves.

Eugene wasn't completely convinced that he would actually get his job back—he did not trust any statement made on the news, because it was not a binding contract—but there was _no _doubt that Dr. Koenig had referred specifically to _him_ on air when she did not have to. The motel staff may very well have told her that he had come up with the idea of getting people out of the second-story rooms. Even if this was not definite, it was _very_ promising. He grinned in spite of himself. Rapunzel turned around to face him, smiling too, and then it hit him.

The face of the senior scientist flashed before his mind's eye, and suddenly he remembered. _She_ was the person he had been reminded of when he first saw Rapunzel. That was who she looked like.

His thoughts started racing. Rapunzel was eighteen; the Koenigs' baby had been kidnapped eighteen years ago. Her hair was not naturally blonde; it only turned that color because of some herbal concoction that she took, and its true color was rich brown—the exact shade of Dr. Koenig's. She lived in the woods, in a cabin that looked like four tree trunks and was only visible when there was no forest canopy to hide it. She hadn't ever known a father. Her "mother" kept her locked up and wouldn't let her leave the house—_ever —_even though _she _did. They had no outside communications. No contact with anyone. They never had. Before fleeing, her supposed mother had made medicine for an infertile couple. The Koenigs had been an infertile couple.

Eugene could hardly keep from gasping aloud as he put the pieces together in his mind. Rapunzel was the Koenigs' kidnapped baby. She had to be.

She didn't notice any changes in his face, apparently, because she merely leaned forward and kissed him. He kissed back, hardly thinking about it at all, but he was practiced enough that he was able to please her with little more than muscle memory. That was the first time he hadn't gotten into a kiss with her, but he was glad that she was focused on it despite that. He did not want to tell her this epiphany just yet, and for once, he realized that he had a good reason to keep something from her. This was not something that he knew beyond any doubt. If he was _wrong,_ then her disappointment would be terrible. It could wait.

* * *

><p>Earlier, back at the remains of the Duck Motel, Gothel emerged from the vending machine nook where she had been hiding. It was not an ideal place, and it was far too close to the tornado for her liking, but it had served its purpose. From the looks of it, the heart of the tornado had not made a direct hit on the motel anyway, though the place had obviously been in the circulation. She stared out at the south parking lot. Debris was scattered everywhere. She looked for the black pickup truck that the Stabbingtons had been driving. It was there, but it had been moved across the lot to the truck parking section and somehow wedged between two semi trucks. The side mirrors had been knocked off by this, she could tell, and undoubtedly the truck had taken cosmetic damage as well. She found that she was not all that concerned about it.<p>

She crept across the darkened lot and backed up against the wall to peer around the corner into the side lot. Her breath caught in shock. Rapunzel was being lifted up by that same storm chaser who had persuaded her that he liked her. Her clothes were shredded, and her legs were badly scraped and bruised, but she was definitely alive and did not look that badly injured overall. She had her arms around his neck.

Gothel's eyes narrowed in anger. For the first time in her life, she realized that she was actually kind of attached to the girl. She had kidnapped Rapunzel as revenge, but after acting as her mother for eighteen years, she did not really want to see her go—especially if she might discover that she was really somebody else's child. If she took up with storm chasers, that was a very strong possibility, too, considering who the parents _were._ And she definitely knew where the cabin was located. Gothel knew that she could be in very big trouble if Rapunzel told anyone her location.

What could she do, though? She had no vehicle. Anyone with whom she might hitch a ride surely would not take her near a tornado. And even if she did somehow catch up with them, what then?

Her gaze shifted back to the black pickup truck. The Stabbingtons still wanted revenge. She knew they were not likely to trust her, but perhaps they could still cut a deal of convenience. She was definitely smarter than they were, so when they inevitably double-crossed her, she would have seen it coming and planned for it. She also had their weapons, having taken away all their knives after she knocked them unconscious.

If anyone would willingly run down a group of crazy storm chasers into a tornado, it was a pair of two other storm chasers who hated their guts. The man Rapunzel was with could probably be baited to get too close to any tornado that formed. That way, he would die without his blood being on Gothel's hands. She knew that Rapunzel would certainly never forgive her if she _caused _his death. And as long as Rapunzel did not die in the storm, Gothel figured she could probably manipulate her emotions and make her believe that he had indifferently put _her _life in danger as well.

Steeling herself, she went back to the truck, climbing into the bed of it and sliding open the back window. The Stabbingtons were moaning and rubbing their ugly faces as they woke up. She cleared her throat.

"Boys?"

They grunted, turned around, and glared angrily as soon as they saw who it was.

"I'm sorry about our misunderstanding earlier," she cooed. "I didn't make my wishes clear enough. It's my fault." The words were disgusting to her, but she knew that she had to do this if she wanted their help.

"What do you want now?" Edvard snarled at her.

"The same thing you want," she said. "Revenge on Flynn Rider."

The brothers looked at each other and broke into evil smiles.

* * *

><p><strong>Note:<strong> I'd like to say something about the "weak" depiction of Rapunzel in this chapter. She's just been through an extreme emotional upheaval _and _physical trauma. I don't think it's a stretch at all for her to be very emotionally fragile at this time or to blame herself for things inappropriately. I'm more familiar with PTSD and survivor's guilt than I would like, and these things often happen once the immediate danger is over. It's the reaction to an emotionally extreme state. It's not supposed to be her usual personality.


	14. Respecting the Wind

**Warning**: Graphic injury and multiple character deaths.

**Note**: Thanks to PrincessVenture, tinkfan14, and Penguinator27 for reviewing. Yes, PrincessVenture, you're quite right about the medicine, and that's important.

I may as well own up, this chapter was emotionally draining to write and that is why it took so long. I hope it doesn't suck.

As much as I like _Twister_ and look the other way when there are inaccuracies (because of art, brevity, excitement, etc.)_,_ I cannot excuse one aspect of the ending: Two people strapping themselves to a pipe while a debris-laden F5 tornado passes right over them, and coming out of it _without a scratch?_ That is unmitigated BS and I am not going to write such a thing here. And it can be pretty well predicted who's going to get hurt. This particular chapter does not deviate too much from what one would expect in this crossover. There is also a little detail in this chapter—a reference/AU carryover from the movie—that I realized, now that this fic is drawing to close, I really wanted to have in this story, and in a more appropriate, nicer way than a snow globe.

This is _not _the last chapter. What I've previously been calling the epilogue has more or less turned into a proper chapter 15, and _that's_ the last one. There won't be an epilogue now.

The title of the chapter is taken from the instrumental Van Halen track "Respect the Wind." I don't own that either.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 14: Respecting the Wind<strong>

* * *

><p>"Hey, you two need to get up. We're about there."<p>

Eugene's eyes snapped open, and the first thing he sensed was that they were rolling along a fairly bumpy stretch of freeway. Lightning was flashing in the distance, the radio was crackling with chatter that he could not yet make out, and something was gripped to his sides, squeezing his torso almost painfully. He couldn't believe he had actually fallen asleep. He must have drifted off after Rapunzel finally fell away from him, while he was holding her close and stroking her soft but now very tangled hair. He looked down at her. Her snake was coiled around one of her ankles, apparently resting as well. He was amazed at Pascal by now; he'd never heard of such a thing, but apparently the animal really did recognize her and understand, on some level, when she was in need of his presence. Eugene then realized that _she _was the one holding him in a death grip, and her face was very troubled. Her eyes were flitting around behind her eyelids and her face was twitching. She was having a fitful, very uneasy sleep.

"Hey," he said to her, nudging her. "Wake up." As she did, her grip loosened.

"Oh," she moaned as she awoke, burying her face against his chest. She let out a dry sob.

"Nightmare?"

"Mmhmm."

He patted the back of her head. "It's all right," he said. "It wasn't real."

She shook involuntarily in his arms. "But it was about things that are."

Eugene didn't know what to say to that. _It'll be all right?_ He knew from personal experience that it wouldn't be all right for some time, but she did have some things to look forward to, and he was going to remind her of that. "You're leaving all that behind, sweetie," he said. "We're going to the city after this. You'll get a job at the lab"—_and almost certainly discover that the directors are your real parents_, he thought—"and I'll probably be there too. And we'll go out and be together, if you want."

"Yeah," she said, but it was noncommittal. Something else was wrong, he could tell.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I don't know what happened to her," Rapunzel said. "I mean... I don't see how she could have..." She broke off.

At first he couldn't see how the woman could have survived in the south parking lot either. That was closer to the inner circulation of the tornado. But he knew there were nooks and crannies in all motels built like that one, things like utility closets, places where vending and soda machines were set up...

"She might have, Rapunzel," he said to her. "When we checked the news a couple of hours ago, or however long it was, there were no reports of deaths." _That means the Stabbingtons are probably alive too, _he thought darkly. Well, they would find out soon enough.

She nodded, apparently mollified by this, and stretched, drawing away from him and sitting upright on the seat. Pascal uncoiled from her ankle and slithered back into his box, darting his tongue out at them. Eugene instantly missed the feel of her warm body against him, but he knew that soon, he would want to take back the wheel. He was far bolder than the others about how close he would be willing to get to a tornado.

"I guess we need to start turning on your sensors," he muttered, reaching for them. The box had been moved into the back seat before they left. They grabbed it by the flaps and lifted it onto the seat between them. She took out about half the sensors, picked up the much lighter box, and unceremoniously dumped the rest on his lap.

"Hey," he complained, grabbing at one before it fell down beneath the seat.

"I want the box empty so they don't get mixed up after we start turning them on," she explained.

He shook his head in exasperation at her perfectionism and began to push the switches on the little sensors, marveling as they lit up with little white LED lights. As soon as one was turned on, Rapunzel or Eugene would drop it back in the box. Despite that there were several score of these little sensors—_she really sacrificed a lot of balloon soundings to save up for this, _Eugene thought—it did not take them that long to finish the job working together. As soon as the sensors were all lit up and operational, Eugene took out his phone and navigated to his radar application.

"Oh my God," he exclaimed, gaping at the screen. He could not believe his eyes. He blinked and looked at the screen again. There it was. The vivid red and green storm relative velocity couplet blared back at him, and right next to it were readings that he had never seen in his life before. There was only one possible tornado he had ever encountered that could have matched this.

"What?" she asked, leaning over the box to have a look.

"There's a 300 knot shear couplet on there," he said in awe.

"Wow," she said softly. "Is that the ground? That's unbelievable."

"No, it's at the base of the cloud, but still."

He was still gaping at the phone, when suddenly he realized that the tornado—and there _had _to be a tornado, and a major one, at that—would be visible whenever lightning struck. Night was slowly turning into morning, but it was only 5:00, so it was still very dark. This was ordinarily not a conducive time of day for a tornado to form, but the incredibly unstable environment and the kick of energy from the outflow boundaries had made that irrelevant. He craned his neck to look out the front windshield. This area looked very familiar, but he could not recall where he had seen it. Suddenly a bolt of lightning struck the ground, lighting up everything in front of it, and then he saw it. It was not as massive a wedge as the previous one, but it was _much_ more intense. A cloud of dirt and debris was spinning and churning around the tornado at the surface. They were about ten miles away, Eugene guessed, but he could still see the enormous debris cloud. The tornado was quite possibly digging up the dirt itself.

As he glanced out at the horizon, he realized why this area looked so familiar. "This is where I used to live," he said in a hush.

"What?" Rapunzel asked.

"My parents' homestead was somewhere out here."

"Really?"

"I'm sure of it." He peered out at the prairie and saw an old, dead tree. His heart skipped a beat. He knew that tree. He recognized its shape, the form and location of its branches, and he knew them intimately. Something flashed into his mind, the memory of climbing that tree so many times as a little boy, when it still put out leaves, before the tornado stripped off its bark and killed it. That tree had saved his bag and the last gift his parents had given him. He took a deep, awed breath. This was almost like treading on sacred ground.

"Oh, Eugene," she said, taking his hand and giving him a sympathetic smile. He smiled back. The thought that this was his old stamping ground actually comforted him, however, rather than saddening him.

"Hey Bignose," said Hook over the radio, "are they awake yet?"

"We're up," Eugene called out before Bignose could respond. "We're wide awake and the sensors are all set."

"All right. If you think you can drive, I think we need to pull off and change over. We'll take the snake if you want."

Eugene turned to Rapunzel. "That's her call," he said.

"It's all right with me," she said. "I mean, we're going to be intercepting a tornado and they won't. He'll be safer with them."

"You heard her," Eugene said into the radio. "But you really think I should drive?"

"This is your element, man. You're the Extreme and don't you forget it! You're better than any of us at finding the right spot."

"I agree," chimed in Vladimir over the radio. The rest of the team concurred, even Ulf, who didn't like speaking.

Eugene felt suddenly self-conscious. "Flynn" had always reassured _himself _of how great he was, and he often had received compliments from people who were awed by his "extreme" storm chasing exploits, but to be complimented like this by people that he regarded as friends was something else. He smiled. "Thanks, guys," he said in surprise.

* * *

><p>"Where are they?" Gothel exclaimed, looking out at the dark roads as the pickup truck approached the looming tornado. "I can't <em>believe <em>they wouldn't come out here."

"They're out here somewhere," Edvard growled. "No way in hell Rider'd miss something like this, 'specially if he's got your girl's sensors."

Along the way, the men and Gothel had pieced the facts together, based on what Rapunzel had told them and what Gothel knew she had bought for her for so many years, and they had worked out what the storm chasers likely intended to do. That was something Gothel could work with. Deploying anything would require that they leave the vehicle, giving Gothel a way to save Rapunzel from what she had planned for Flynn. Her intention was for the Stabbingtons to drive as close as they could to the tornado, which would hopefully tempt Flynn to get even closer in an attempt to one-up them in his instrument deployment, and then to snatch Rapunzel away from the danger.

"There they are," Gudric suddenly said, pointing at another road to their left—the freeway, from the look of it. The white Mustang led the way, followed by the battered radar-topped van and the unicorn-painted truck. They were coming at a basically perpendicular angle to the path of the storm, but the Stabbingtons' truck had a closer approach to the tornado.

"Gun it," Edvard ordered his brother, and immediately Gudric stomped the accelerator, making the truck lurch forward and start to cruise at the faster speed. Within seconds, the white Mustang pulled away from the chase caravan, looking very much as if its driver was trying to catch the tornado first. Gothel smiled to herself. So far, so good. People were _so _predictable.

* * *

><p>Eugene could not believe his eyes. The Stabbingtons were out here, trying to chase a tornado that their rip-off instrument cylinder absolutely <em>could not <em>stand up to, and driving in a truck that _definitely _had both side mirrors missing, from how it looked, and probably had more damage than that. And they were speeding up, taking dead aim directly for the tornado. Approaching it from due east, as they were, rather than southeast from the freeway, they would have difficulty evading the thing if they got in the path. He knew they were idiots, but this really took the cake.

Rapunzel was staring at the swirling mass of wind, water, dirt, and debris as lightning struck around it. "Eugene," she said, "that thing is really dangerous."

_Well, that's obvious,_ he thought. "No kidding," he said, raising an eyebrow at her.

"I'm scared," she said. "Maybe it's just that it's dark and my mind has been thinking dark thoughts already and this is a totally desolate area, but I just feel like... like it's a beast, some kind of wild terror. I don't know if I can go outside and put anything in the path of _that._ It's almost like... challenging it." Her voice was quiet and strangely calm. It unnerved Eugene, and he gave her an uneasy look.

"It's not alive, you know," he said. _"You _had to remind _me _that it wasn't good to look at it as me against the storm in some anthropomorphic way, you know, when the deployment failed. Don't start thinking that way yourself."

She nodded and swallowed hard, looking down. "I just have a really bad feeling about this, is all."

"You _are _letting your thoughts about everything else get to you. C'mon, Rapunzel, you said in the parking lot that you wanted to do this. I wouldn't have gone along with it otherwise."

"_Mother!"_ Rapunzel suddenly screamed. She gripped the sides of her seat and turned white as the blood drained from her face. "Eugene, she's got to be with them! I don't care if they get picked up by the tornado, but I don't want her to—"

"I'll call them," he said. He still had their numbers in his phone, though the only reason for it was that he was too lazy to ever remove old contacts. He was glad he still had them, though. He didn't try to argue with Rapunzel that this probably wasn't her real mother and certainly didn't try to argue that she was no good and deserved to die too. Even if she _wasn't _Rapunzel's real mother, even if she wasn't a particularly good person, she was the only mother figure she had ever known—the only _person_ she had known until yesterday—and though _he _personally didn't care what happened to the woman, he would do this for Rapunzel's sake. Holding the wheel with one hand, he dialed the first Stabbington brother in his contact list and waited.

"You got a lot of nerve calling us," Edvard snarled over the phone after he answered.

"I'm not calling because I give a damn about either of you," Eugene said nastily. "It's for Rapunzel. You got her mom with you?"

"I'm here." Gothel's voice was fainter than the man's, but she was not next to the phone, apparently. Eugene put the phone on speaker and held it out to Rapunzel, keeping his eyes on the road the whole time.

"Mother!" Rapunzel cried, staring out the window as the truck approached the circulation. She winced as the truck swerved to the right and had to jerk hard to get back on the road. "Mother, tell them to turn around and get out of there! You're in danger! It's going northeast and you are going to be really close—"

"Rapunzel, they know what they are doing." Her voice was tight and cold.

"No they don't!" Eugene exclaimed without thinking. "They've done asinine things for years! They're just never gotten anyone killed before because they were _lucky."_

"Fuck you, Rider," Gudric snarled. Over the phone, Eugene and Rapunzel heard wheels squealing.

"Eugene, be quiet," Rapunzel said in irritation. "Mother, _please _make them turn around!"

Gothel laughed. "Did your storm chaser put you up to this? He just wants to get all the fame and glory with a closer shot, you know."

"Yeah, Rider's pissed about our instruments and he'll do anything to keep us from deploying. That's all this shit is about."

"You can't deploy it, you idiots!" Eugene shouted. "That one's too strong, and the design is flawed anyway. You're wasting your time!"

"Yeah, yeah," one of them said sarcastically.

"Mother, _trust me!"_ Rapunzel screamed.

"Rapunzel, we're done talking about this."

"But—"

The phone went dead. Rapunzel let out a cry of despair and fear, her eyes glued to the window. The truck passed into an eddy of dust churned up by the tornado and emerged on the other side swerving around the road almost out of control.

"Eugene, the storm's shifting!" she cried. He craned his neck to look at the tornado. It was shifting its path rightward. It would now pass even closer to the truck.

Eugene dialed the number again. "It's a right-mover!" he exclaimed into the phone without any introduction. "Get out of there _now!"_

"Shut up, Rider. Losing your nerve?" The phone went dead again.

Eugene was about to redial the number one last time, for Rapunzel's sake, when his mouth went dry. The tornado picked the truck up off the ground and lifted it about 100 feet in the air. Rapunzel watched, eyes wide with horror and dread, as it circled the outskirts of the funnel, rising ever so slightly, then began to fall. Time seemed to slow down as the tragedy unfolded before them. Eugene froze, driving as if it were autopilot, holding the phone in hand. His face fell.

The truck crashed to the ground and exploded in a fireball.

Rapunzel let out a cry of despair and buried her face in her hands. Muffled sobs escaped from her. Eugene let his phone fall out of his hand onto the seat and reached out to pat her shoulder. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "I'm so sorry."

"You tried," she whispered, her voice choked with tears. "She just wouldn't listen. She never trusted anyone, even... even me. She always thought"—Rapunzel let out a sob—"that it would save her."

After a moment he spoke again. "Do you want to turn around?"

"No," she said determinedly, wiping her eyes and sitting upright. "We're going to do this."

The tornado was now less than a mile away, and the circulation was starting to blow the car around. Eugene looked ahead, judging the path, and finally spoke. "We're going to cut through the field between the roads," he said. He peered out at the horizon. They would have to park on the side of the road far enough away that it would not get hurled about by the winds, dash ahead into the tornado's expected path, set down the box, and make a run for it back to the car. He took a deep breath. This was going to require hair-trigger timing, but they could do it. At least the car had pep and could get them out of there in a hurry.

Rapunzel nodded, sniffling and taking a deep breath. "Let's do it."

Eugene braked hard, swerved off the road, and began driving along the shoulder as he slowed down. That tornado was ferocious, almost certainly an F5, and he wanted to have a good head start on it. He braked again, stopped the car on the shoulder, and opened the doors. He and Rapunzel grabbed the box of sensors and ran toward the other road as hard as they could.

The tornado shifted its path again, this time back to the left, putting more distance between itself and them. Eugene swore in frustration and ran harder. Rapunzel struggled to keep up. She was dragging him behind, and she knew it and hated it. Now the deployment spot would be in the field on the _other _side of the road rather than the road itself, and that field was bounded by a barbed-wire fence.

"I think this is private property," Rapunzel remarked as she tried to ease through the fence. Her braid caught on the wire, and she let out a squeal of pain.

Eugene dropped the box and came back to help her. He untangled her hair and helped her the rest of the way through the fence, but the delay had cost them. The tornado was also picking up forward speed.

"Come on!" he exclaimed, grabbing one side of the box. She grabbed the other and began running, trying very hard to keep pace with him this time. They stopped in the middle of the field, which appeared to be a pasture.

Eugene pulled out his phone and dialed the others. "Hey!" he called over the roar of the wind. "Turn on the computer! We're about to go."

"Done," Hook said.

Without hanging up, he turned to Rapunzel. "Come on, let's get out of here!"

They began to run, harder than they had ever run before, at a right angle to the path of the tornado. Eugene could not help himself; he had to watch this to see if it worked. He stopped and whirled around. Rapunzel followed suit. They stared at the tornado as the massive swirling black cloud approached their box of sensors. Rapunzel held her breath.

"Look!" Eugene cried out as the winds made contact. The tornado threw the box around, then immediately picked it up. Rapunzel and Eugene watched as the sensors lofted up into the air, white lights shining like a swarm of fireflies, and began to sparkle from a distance as they passed in and out of debris clouds. The propellers gave them some buoyancy and resistance to the air, making it seem that the lights were almost floating instead of merely being shot around like bullets by the ferocious winds. Her face seemed to light up in joy as the lights went higher and higher in the dark funnel.

"It's beautiful!" she exclaimed, enraptured by the lights. She took his hand.

"We're getting data!" Hook called over the speakerphone, jerking them back to reality.

"Sorry, we can't watch!" Eugene exclaimed, beginning to run again, still holding her hand. She gasped and tried to keep pace with him.

Dirt and bits of plant material began to pelt them. "Run!" Eugene shouted above the roar of the wind, mud and blades of grass marking his boots as he tore through the field. "I think it's getting faster!"

Rapunzel gazed over her shoulder at the tornado. It was not just getting faster. "It's moving back to the right!" she exclaimed.

He whirled around. She was correct. "Oh no," he said. All of a sudden he really did not feel good about this. They couldn't take the same path back to the car that they had before. That would take them too close to the circulation. But a longer return path came with its own set of risks. And the car—but no, Eugene would not think of what might happen if his car were thrown.

They ran hard through the rest of the field. The wind roared, and the size of the debris that the tornado was throwing at them increased. They were now dodging sticks, branches, and what looked very much like gardening tools and fragments of treated wood. At some point along its path, the tornado had apparently hit a building. The realization made Eugene feel ill, but he couldn't think about that right now.

They reached the fence. He quickly leaped over it, but she did not follow. "Eugene!" she cried in terror, and as he turned around, his heart skipped a beat. She was caught by her hair again, this time on two different wires. Eugene stopped, doubled back, and began trying to undo her hair. It was really badly tangled now.

Unidentifiable debris began pelting them as the black funnel approached, leaving small bloody marks on both of them as it hit. Rapunzel began to weep. "I'm _so sorry!"_ she exclaimed. Eugene didn't know what to say. For the first time since this particular chase began, he really was not sure that they were going to survive, but he didn't want to tell her that. He had a feeling she knew it already. But he was _not _going to abandon her to her fate, tied to a fence by her own hair, while selfishly saving himself. They were in this together.

Suddenly, unbelievably, a set of garden shears dropped a few feet away. Eugene lunged at them, grabbed them as if the tornado would take away the gift it had given—which it very well might—and without even thinking about it, sliced through the golden braid, cropping her hair only a few inches away from her scalp. He tossed the shears aside and helped her through the fence. "Come on!" he exclaimed. They stood up, but immediately were knocked over as something hit them. It was a piece of tire. Eugene tried to stand up again, but the wind was now too strong. Pieces of small debris were hitting both of them, leaving bruises and scrapes as they dug into their battered bodies.

He frantically looked around for something, _anything,_ to crawl under, and noticed a big drainage pipe running under a bridge on the road. The pipe looked to be about 30 feet long and was about four feet high. It would be a tight fit, but they had nothing else. Eugene and Rapunzel crawled into the pipe, trying to get as close to the center as possible, and gazed at each other. Sheer terror was in her face.

"Eugene," she whimpered, curling against him and holding him as tight as she could. He gripped her firmly.

"I'm not letting go," he said. "Understand? Whatever happens."

She nodded, seemingly calmed by his words. "Whatever happens."

They stared out the end of the pipe that faced the field. The tornado drew closer and closer, the roar increasing as it came, until finally there was nothing visible out there but the fierce black debris cloud. Bits of destroyed material danced around at the end of the pipe, rattling the metal, but they could hear very little now except the roar, that unearthly roar. The ground and the metal pipe began to vibrate above them. Winds blasted down the pipe, making whistling and moaning sounds against the metal wall as if it were part of some giant pipe organ. Eugene stretched out his legs to brace himself against both sides of the pipe. They clutched each other tighter. Unable to stand looking at it any longer, Rapunzel buried her face in his right shoulder.

Then it happened. A thud. A gasp. Eugene was jerked backward by something and slammed against the metal. A cry of sheer, unreserved agony escaped his lips, and he doubled over. Something hot and wet splashed in Rapunzel's face. She snapped her head up and gasped in horror. A piece of metal had impelled itself into his left shoulder, poking all the way through his body, and blood was pouring out of the wound, spurting everywhere. His jacket and shirt were becoming stained bright red. Without thinking, Rapunzel moved to take the metal in her hands.

"Don't take it out," he gasped. She realized what would happen if she removed the object and drew away. The wind continued to howl, completely oblivious to what was happening inside the little pipe, an uncaring, nonliving force of nature.

Rapunzel frantically looked around for something that she could use as a tourniquet. There was nothing except the clothes on her back. Without a thought, she removed the shirt she was wearing, his shirt, and tied it around the wound as tightly as she could. It was not a good place for a wound. The tourniquet was barely above the wound, but Rapunzel could not get it any farther away. The blood stopped spurting through the air as she tied off the shirt, but it still flowed at an alarming rate, soaking his clothes. Her hands were sticky and red, but she didn't think of that—except for the fact that this was _his blood, _his life fluid, covering her hands. Eugene was turning white and his breaths were becoming shallower. The wind was slacking off, at least. The tornado was passing. They could hear each other.

"Rapunzel—" he gasped out. There was a note of farewell in his voice, and it sent a chill over her body.

"Don't you die on me!" she shouted. "Don't you _dare _die on me, Eugene!"

"Rapunzel—you _have_ to tell the lab directors about your life—the cabin and your mom and everything. You'll understand why after you do it. Tell them _everything_. The flower. The medicine."

"_The medicine!"_ she screamed suddenly. She had used that medicine a lot as a little girl for scratches and splinters that she picked up around the wooden cabin. It could help blood coagulate. She didn't know if it would work for a wound like this, but she had to try. Did he have his satchel? She looked around. There it was! She frantically opened the flap and fumbled around for the little bottle that he had—_thank God,_ she thought—stolen from her dresser yesterday. She opened it. Her hands were shaking as she poured the entire contents of the bottle on Eugene's wounded shoulder.

Instantly the blood flow began to moderate. Blood began to collect around the wound, helping to seal it off, but Eugene was still deathly white, and his eyes were closed. His breathing was very slow and shallow now. There was no more noise from the outside, and Rapuzel vaguely noticed that debris was no longer churning outside the other end of the pipe. The sky was becoming brighter as the sun rose. The sight was disgusting to her, a cruel mockery.

"Rapunzel, look at me," he whispered, forcing his eyes open. She held his wrist, feeling the faint, slow heartbeat, and looked miserably at his face. Tears fell from her eyes and landed on his cheek.

"I love you," she said.

"I love you too," he said, struggling to speak. He closed his eyes and exhaled.

She drew back in horror and utter, raw grief. "No," she said dumbly. "No. Eugene, please don't leave me," she whispered. "Please. Please don't." She leaned over his body. There was no breathing, and the heartbeat was very, very faint.

Rapunzel knew nothing about CPR or emergency resuscitation, but she did know that she was not going to let him go without a fight. Eugene wasn't breathing and his heart was barely working, but _she _could _make_ him breathe. She could force his heart to pump. She leaned over him and began mouthing air into his body, pushing his chest periodically. His heartbeat became a little stronger, but he didn't wake up. "No," she cried in between pushes and breaths. "No." Hope was leaving her, but she just couldn't stop. Something told her to keep going. She couldn't just let him go.

"Eugene," she finally cried out, collapsing against his shoulder and sobbing into his neck.

Then she felt arms gripping her back. Movement. Intention. _Life._

"Rapunzel," he said hoarsely.

"Eugene?" she whispered, hardly believing. She drew back and looked at him. He was still ghostly white, and very, very weak, but he was alive. Breathing. Talking.

"I... I said no," he whispered.

"What?"

"You kept crying out for me and I told them no. I need to be here with you."

She wiped away tears. He didn't seem to be making a lot of sense, and she had no idea what he was trying to tell her, but that wasn't what she was thinking about right now. What mattered was that he was still alive. "Eugene, you've got to get to a hospital," she said. Always practical, she pulled out his satchel, now spattered with his blood, and took out his phone.

"I'm not dying now," he said, a bit of a laugh in his words, though his voice was still very weak. "I don't know how... but they said so."

"Eugene, what do you mean?"

"My parents."

She pulled away and stared at him open-mouthed. "Eugene, do you really think...?"

"Yes. I do." He took the phone away from her, dialed a number, and handed it back to her. "Here. You handle it."

She barely remembered what she told the dispatcher on the phone, but apparently it was sufficient to indicate what had happened, because she found herself ending the call and staring at him in almost reverent awe. "You chose _me,"_ she whispered to him, caressing his pale cheek.

He smiled back. They could not say anything else to each other, but they did not have to. They stayed like that until the ambulance arrived.

* * *

><p><strong>End note: <strong> In case it's not blindingly obvious, Eugene had a near-death experience. And from what I know of the topic, apparently it's not at all uncommon for "miraculous" spontaneous remissions and healings to occur in conjunction with them. So that's what I'm going with.

One more chapter left. I feel a little wistful about it.


	15. Recovery

**Note:** Well guys, this is a wrap. First, thanks to everyone who reviewed, favorited, and set up an alert for this story. It's very motivating to know that people are interested in something you've done. :)

Next, there's a serious personal note here, so skip ahead to the chapter if you don't want to read any more "confessions." I've chosen to complete this story today, the 27th, because on this day in 2011, the deadliest tornado outbreak of modern times occurred in the U.S. I was affected by this outbreak—and conflicted, since I was already studying meteorology when it happened and was obviously fascinated by the natural aspect of it, while being horrified by the human tragedy at the same time. I saw some things close up, in nearby towns, that I wish I hadn't. The events associated with that outbreak (and its aftermath) gave me some perspective on survivor's guilt, PTSD, and, I am sorry to admit, dysfunctional control-related issues. Obviously all this influenced this story a great deal. Though I did not experience a personal tragedy that day, the story became a lot more autobiographical in some ways than I'd intended, and I appreciate your putting up with that when all that you probably really wanted was to read about these awesome characters in an offbeat AU. Thanks for sticking around! (There are more notes at the end.)

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 15: Recovery<strong>

* * *

><p>"I don't have to go to the hospital," Rapunzel protested as the paramedics lowered her body onto a stretcher. Eugene was already hooked up in the back of the ambulance, but these people wanted to take her to the hospital too. She had never been to a hospital before and didn't want to go now. This was one experience that she did <em>not <em>desire. She sat up. It really hurt the bruises, scratches, and puncture wounds that dotted her body, but she wanted to prove to them that she was okay. "I'll be _fine,"_ she said, wincing.

The storm chase team was right there. They had rushed to the scene after the tornado passed, terrified of what they were going to find—or not find. They were relieved that they were both alive, though they did not have Eugene's post-near-death-experience confidence that he was not going to die after all. He had lost a _lot _of blood, and he was starting to drift into unconsciousness again. Worry lines creased their burly faces, and a couple of the chasers frowned at Rapunzel for her stubbornness. "You're battered," Hook said to Rapunzel. "Stop fighting them, babe."

"Yeah, if you don't go with them, you're going with _us,"_ Vladimir added. "You're going in whether you like it or not."

Rapunzel sighed and leaned back on the stretcher. She supposed that she might as well stop this, because it was preventing them from bringing Eugene to the hospital, and he really needed to be there. "Fine," she muttered. "But he's in terrible shape. Don't worry too much about_ me."_

Once they arrived, Rapunzel was treated with antibiotics, bandaged up, and checked over, but as she had already known, there was nothing seriously wrong with her. She did not get to see Eugene; he was quickly rushed into the critical care unit to get a blood transfusion, a massive dose of antibiotics, and to have the metal spike safely removed from his shoulder. After that the doctors would begin to repair the tissue damage as well as they could, but they were already dropping hints to the chase team and Rapunzel about permanent nerve damage. She hated it for his sake, but she was just glad that he was alive. However, no one was allowed to see him just yet.

Rapunzel waited in the hospital lobby that afternoon trying to think about everything that had happened. Now that there were no distractions—no tornado to chase and no warm arms to wrap around her and make her forget everything—it was overwhelming. Her mother was dead, and she had never had a chance to say goodbye properly. The only consolation she had was that she had tried to save her mother's life despite what the woman had done to her the day before. Her house was also destroyed along with most of her belongings. At least she still had Pascal. She was very glad she had insisted on bringing her pet along on the chase. Pascal was a small animal, so he might have survived the tornado if he had been there, but she would not likely have seen him again.

"You know," Hook remarked to her as he sat next to her, "we got a lot of data out of those sensors of yours."

She smiled weakly at him. "I'm glad."

"It was definitely an F5."

"I'm not surprised."

"We told the Koenigs about it. They're gonna be here in a few minutes. You'll get to meet 'em. They sounded really interested in you. Oh yeah, and they said Rider's back on the team."

"That's good."

Hook glanced at her. "I think he's going to be all right," he said compassionately. "He's a lucky punk, too. And I don't just mean because he survived that."

She smiled. She knew what he meant. "Thanks."

"There they are," Attila suddenly said, pointing at a pair of people coming into the lobby.

Rapunzel looked up. The man was large-bodied, with blue eyes, silver hair, and a beard. The woman was thinner. Her long, rich brown hair was also streaked with silver and tied in a ponytail. Her eyes, though framed by bifocals and creased by lines of worry, age, and, it appeared to Rapunzel, deep sorrow, were the exact shade of green as her own. As the pair neared, she realized that the resemblance went much farther than that. This woman was practically a doppelganger of her in facial features. If her hair had been longer and its true color, the resemblance would be even more striking.

The woman's eyes suddenly popped as she approached. Her jaw dropped and her mouth fell open a little. As she reached the group, she shook her head slightly, as if trying to clear her thoughts physically, and gave them a shaky smile. "Ingrid Koenig," she said, shaking Rapunzel's hand. "I'm so glad to meet you, dear."

Rapunzel suddenly remembered what Eugene had told her when he was dying. It was really important, apparently, for her to tell these people about her life, if that was what he needed to tell her as (he thought) a last request. She resolved to do this at the first opportunity. For now, they had to get acquainted and talk about the events of the previous day.

* * *

><p>That evening Rapunzel's emotional shock had increased tenfold. Apparently, around nineteen years ago, these scientists had undergone an experimental treatment for infertility—a certain medicine made out of a mutated flower—but the baby they had wanted so badly had been kidnapped shortly after it was born. After Rapunzel explained about her cabin, her strange upbringing, her mother's—well, <em>Gothel's<em>—past as a plant breeder and herbalist, the Koenigs were pretty sure that _she was their daughter._ Rapunzel could not believe it, but she agreed to undergo a DNA test to settle the question.

It came back positive.

Eugene must have known about it, she realized after she got back the shocking—well, by that time, not so shocking—results of the test. He had known the Koenigs and known their back story. He had definitely known about Crown Enterprises. He must have pieced everything together in his mind, but not told her because he wasn't absolutely certain of it. When he thought he was going to die, he had insisted that she tell them about her past so that they could put the pieces together too. Tears came to her eyes as she thought about what this implied. He must have figured it out before the tornado, but he still tried to save Gothel's life for her sake. Then he thought he was going to die, but he wanted to give her the keys to finding her family so that she wouldn't be completely alone in the world. She had told him already, but now that she understood fully what he had been trying to do, she realized that she really, really loved him. And she was infinitely grateful that his gift to her had not been darkened by his death after all.

He was not able to have visitors, but the Koenigs still stayed overnight in the hospital at Rapunzel's insistence. She was not going to leave him that night, whether he knew that she was there or not. However, the next day, she went to her new home to begin to get acquainted with her new parents. The first request she made was to have her hair dyed its natural color. That was what it would look like from now on anyway. The mutant flower had been destroyed in the fourth tornado along with everything else in the cabin, including Gothel's supply of elixir. The little bottle that Eugene had swiped had been used up to save his life. She had very mixed feelings about the flower and the herbal made from it, and she was happy to see them gone now. She would not have been conceived without it, but because of it, she didn't get to meet her real parents until she was an adult.

They talked a lot about what sort of relationship they should have. Rapunzel was an adult, and the Koenigs knew that they could not expect to treat her as a child. The Koenigs knew that her relationship with them would always be different from that of other adults with their parents. Most parents would watch their child grow up and find their own partner, who would then become the most important person in the world to the child, but the years of that status would have forged a bond so close that the parents would not actually feel that they had lost much "rank" in their child's heart at all. When Ingrid Koenig had been pregnant, she had thought about that. It had been a sad thing to think of, but she had known that that was how it was supposed to be, and she had comforted herself with knowing that she and her husband would, at least, be the most important people in the world to their child for many years. Even after she had been kidnapped, they had hoped that if she was still alive and they found her while she was yet a little girl, they could be that to her. Now it was too late, and that would never be. The close bond wasn't there; it had to be formed, and all three of them knew it would not match that other bond that had begun to form the past several days. The relationship would no doubt become warm and loving, and in time she truly would regard them as parents, but they would always be second place. However, they were glad to have what they could.

Rapunzel moved into her new home and immediately began painting her bedroom with pictures of the events that happened during her first chase trip. She wanted lots and lots of plants so that Pascal would be happy, but _none _with flowers. It was too painful to think about right now. She was home, but she did not leave the hospital for good for another two weeks—for Eugene had a major, multi-tissue injury that had to be treated. They moved him into a regular hospital room once he was stabilized. He was out of it for most of the time, but when he _was_ conscious, he was always aware that she was there.

He didn't say much during her visits, because he did not quite trust himself to speak. He thought he had come to terms with everything on the chase, but now his thoughts were jumbled up again—this time in a good way—though he figured that a near-death experience would do that to you. He knew that he needed to be a far better person for her sake and that somehow he had grasped something of his true potential. Opening the door to whatever it was he _could _become seemed to have caused the jumble in his mind; it was too much to contemplate all at once, but Rapunzel provided a point of focus for him when she was there. As she leaned over his bedside to talk to him, he would gaze at her with unfathomable looks in his eyes.

On the seventh night, she was getting ready to leave for the night. She had just been telling him about how her new parents had gone out to the swamp with her to recover everything they could from her cabin. The few items that they salvaged, she brought home and locked in a trunk. She was glad that they had been saved, and she knew that someday she would want to look at them again, but right now she did not want to see them. He listened to this emotional outpouring, which was mixed with more than a few tears, and when she kissed him goodnight, he finally spoke.

"Goodnight, Rapunzel. I love you," he said hoarsely.

She stopped en route to the door, where her parents were waiting. They backed into the hallway to give them their privacy when they realized what he had said. She turned around, walked back to the bed, and kissed him again. "I love you too," she whispered.

* * *

><p>Her discovery was the biggest story in Corona in a long time, and the media ate it up. Between the team of "serious" journalists suddenly styling themselves as "investigative reporters" into the shady practices of Crown Enterprises, the tabloid paparazzi digging for dirty details of how Gothel had treated Rapunzel and making things up when all else failed, and the mass of mainstream reporters simply wanting to get as much as they could about the human-interest angle, they had their hands full with media inquiries. The Koenigs and the storm chase team handled the swarm. They would not allow members of the press to speak to Rapunzel, despite her comparatively good state of health. She did not object. The last people she wanted to talk to were reporters. She didn't even like the idea of something so personal being plastered all over the media for everyone to gawk at voyeuristically. Why was it anyone else's <em>business<em> that the Koenigs' daughter had been found? They weren't even public figures. She expressed this opinion very angrily one night before an interview was scheduled, dropping one of Eugene's choice words into her rant before blushing and apologizing. Her parents had laughed, however, and assured her that if she didn't want to talk to the media, she wouldn't have to.

Finally the day came that Eugene was scheduled to be discharged. His shoulder was bandaged tightly where the bone had been reconstructed. He could not use his left arm except clumsily, but the doctors were feeling more optimistic about his prognosis than they initially had. They had told him that most function might return in time. It was worth it to him either way.

Rapunzel clutched his other arm protectively as they walked out of the hospital together and headed for the Koenigs' minivan, which was in the parking garage. Eugene's Mustang had taken some serious damage from debris impacts and had been tossed against a tree by the outer circulation of the F5, but it was in the shop and would apparently be repaired. In any case, he was in no condition to drive one-handed. As they left the hospital at last, he noticed members of the media parked outside the hospital, just _waiting _for him to make an appearance. One of them pointed at the van. Cameras swiveled over, and at once, Eugene ducked down. He knew that this was a huge, feel-good (at least to people who were not part of it), emotional story, and that reporters would have currency signs figuratively flashing in their eyes at the thought of a story like this, but this was ridiculous. He'd just gotten out of the freaking _hospital._

Their next stop was the courthouse. The Koenigs had wanted to have lunch with him after he got out of the hospital, but he had insisted that this needed to be taken care of first. The paparazzi swerved around the block as the Koenigs' minivan pulled in, but he and the little family had dashed inside before they could be interrogated. He went before the judge as Flynn and emerged from the courthouse, finally, lawfully, as Eugene again. The camera-toting mob was waiting outside.

"Mr. Fitzherbert," one of the reporters at the front of the mob said, shoving a microphone into his face. "WCRN reporting live. Do you have any statement to make about unexpectedly discovering Miss Koenig or getting your old job back despite attacking your late colleagues in public?"

Eugene stopped. His eyebrows narrowed.

"Oh dear," Ingrid Koenig said softly.

"No, _Mr. Fitzherbert_ has no comment," he said in a voice so tight that it sounded like it might explode. "But if you need a _statement_ for your _live story, _then here's one from Flynn Rider." And with that, he stuck his right hand directly in the reporter's face, middle finger extended.

The Koenigs and Rapunzel burst into laughter and dashed away with him into their van. Cameras flashed and popped around them, but they didn't care.

"I can't believe you did that," Rapunzel said, punching his right arm as she sat down next to him.

He laughed. "I can't quite believe it either, but man did it feel good. I hope the whole city saw it on live TV."

"I assume you still want to be yourself, though," she said in a more serious tone.

"Of course. But the 'Flynn' part of me has been there for so long—and to be honest with you, I don't think it's _all _bad"—he gave the Koenigs a wink—"that I'll probably always think of certain kinds of remarks or actions as 'Flynn' actions."

"It's _not _all bad," Rapunzel said. "Nobody's all bad or all good. No, nobody," she said as he opened his mouth to object. "And it's not like your 'good' side is all Eugene and your 'bad' side is all Flynn. After all, wasn't it Eugene who decided to 'become' Flynn in the first place?"

"You're right," he muttered. "As always."

* * *

><p>A couple of weeks later, the lab's technical team was going over the data gathered in the tornado. Rapunzel was among the technical wizards that day, watching them analyze her data. Rapunzel loved the entire lab and was intrigued by what everyone did there, so she wanted to experience everything to do with it. She was also recreating a prototype of her design out of much more precise instruments than disposable radiosondes. They were going to try to deploy the new and improved sensors in a tornado by shooting them at the funnel. It was simply far too dangerous to try what she and Eugene had tried, and the Koenigs were not going to risk it again. Eugene himself was at his desk, working on a write-up about the tornado. He was now able to type with his left hand, though it slowed him down. He didn't mind that Rapunzel was not clinging to his side all the time now. He was happy that she was adapting so well, and he definitely was not being deprived of her company in general. In fact, he was a little worried that <em>he <em>was depriving her parents of her company.

"Eugene, could you see us in the office?"

Eugene looked around and saw Ingrid Koenig. She bore an impassive expression on her face. Eugene gulped. Was he about to be chewed out for keeping their "new" daughter from them? Did they suspect that he was taking her to bed? He wasn't, but he knew that parents could be paranoid about that, and he had certainly _tried_ to the day he'd met her. That was the sort of thing he did—well, _used_ to do—and he fell into that pattern even when he had met a girl that he really cared about. He was glad now that Rapunzel had stopped him, because he wouldn't have wanted their first time, her first time _period,_ to be in a creaky bed in a shabby motel with lies and deceptions still between them. But he knew he couldn't explain any of this to the Koenigs, because if this _was _what they wanted to talk to him about, an explanation like that would only make it infinitely worse. He would just have to reassure them that he wasn't having sex with her when they were on dates and that he would give them more time with their daughter. He took a deep breath as he got up and followed Dr. Koenig into the office.

She went into the little pantry room that linked her office and her husband's, took out a plastic bag, and walked over to a coffee machine. She opened the bag. A delightful scent filled the air.

"Coffee, Eugene?" she asked. "It's Sumatran extra dark roast." She held up the bag for him to see.

He was staring open-mouthed. "Um," he said inarticulately. Dr. Koenig raised an eyebrow at him. "Yes, thank you," he managed to stammer out. "I just never knew you had a separate machine in here."

"I don't care for that multi-flavored stuff that Attila brings to the break room," she said. "I don't think you're getting the real flavor of coffee if you add so much other stuff to it, you know?" Her eyes were twinkling.

"I love you," he gasped out.

She chuckled. "I'm glad to hear it. Bad relations among one's future in-laws would make things very uncomfortable in years to come."

He blinked. Had she really just said that? He gaped at her. "Um," he said again. She gazed back at him serenely. "Well, it couldn't be more uncomfortable than you've just made it," he finally said.

A masculine chuckle parted the air, and Dr. Wilhelm Koenig entered the little lounge. "Have a seat," he said. Eugene didn't dare disobey.

"You must be wondering why we've called you in here," Wilhelm Koenig said.

"Yes, and I am a little apprehensive," Eugene confessed.

"You don't need to be. My wife and I just think we need to have a talk. There are a lot of things that need to be aired out, so to speak."

Eugene sat back and waited expectantly.

Dr. Wilhelm Koenig peered into his face. "First of all, I'm very glad to see your affection for my daughter."

He grinned. "What can I say? She's an amazing woman."

"She has been through a lot, Eugene."

He nodded. "She has. Much more than I have."

"She will be given love—real love—by my wife and me, but I think that in cases like these, there is no such thing as too much love. She's just lost the person that she believed was her mother, who _did _raise her"—the man choked on his words—"and while she's doing an admirable job of coping with everything, I know she is struggling with her feelings about that. My wife and I are trying to help her through it, but she needs you too."

"Well, she has me. She's mentioned that subject several times," he said, grimacing, "and it's way above my pay grade, so to speak, but I'm trying to help her deal with it. How to address her grief about that while acknowledging that you"—he turned to Ingrid Koenig—"are actually her mother."

The man nodded approvingly. "A few weeks ago I would have had grave misgivings about your having a relationship with her, or, to be perfectly frank, anyone... but I think that you are a very different person from who you were then."

"I think so too. And"—he swallowed hard, as if swallowing his pride itself—"it was about time that I dealt with all that."

"Yes, Mr. Fitzherbert, it was." He leaned back in his chair and turned to his wife, as if giving her a cue to speak.

Dr. Ingrid Koenig looked Eugene in the eye. "I may as well tell you, Fl—Eugene, when you first became a part of the lab, we really wanted you to be part of our lives. We had lost our daughter. You had lost your parents and even your identity. Yes, we knew that it was an assumed name," she said, holding up a hand for silence as he opened his mouth. "My husband owned a copy of the book when he was a boy."

"Very entertaining book, by the way," Wilhelm Koenig added.

"We went along with it because obviously you had some reason why your true name was painful to you, and in any case, we didn't know what it was. If that was what you wanted to be called, that's what we would call you."

Eugene was dumbstruck.

"And as we got to know you better, my husband and I soon came to regard you, well, not quite as an adoptive son, but definitely as a protégé."

Well, he wasn't too surprised. He had thought that himself when he was still "Flynn." It was actually gratifying to know that it wasn't just his own arrogance and egotism, and that it really had been there. However... "Then why did you sack me?" he exclaimed.

"Sometimes a person has to do something painful because it is in the other person's best interest. It had become clear to us that you were not coping with the issues in your past. I had long hoped that being in the lab, among other people with a desire for excitement and a love of weather, would benefit you. But rather than the lab being a stable environment that reshaped _you,_ you were making the lab over in the image of yourself."

He could hardly believe his ears. That was _exactly _what he had been doing. How long had she been aware of it? Just how well did this woman _understand_ him anyway?

Well, she was Rapunzel's mother, and Rapunzel certainly understood him quite well. It would figure.

She peered at him. "You're different from what you were. It's uncommon for such a drastic change to occur so suddenly, but significant events change people, and it _can _happen very quickly under those circumstances." She stood up. "I like what I see. And I think that deep down, you do too."

He grinned. "I don't have to look deep down."

"Well, I'm glad that you're at peace with the changes rather than fighting them."

"Thank you for everything," he said, sensing that the meeting was over.

"No, thank _you_ for everything." She gave him a look of deep gratitude and affection. "You can get back to your report, Eugene. That's all we needed to tell you."

"Um... hey? Sorry to interrupt."

All three heads turned to the door on Wilhelm's side. Rapunzel stood in the doorway, her eyes wide, looking completely frazzled. She held out a large, colorful map.

"What are we looking at?" Eugene asked.

"Forecast EHI for three days from now. Look at this!" She pointed at a dark red spot. "Just look at it! I don't see how I can get the new prototype done in time for this!"

He got up and took the map away from her gently. "Don't worry about it."

She glanced at him with wide eyes. "Are you sure?"

"There'll be other storms," Ingrid Koenig said, smiling.

"And I think we've seen enough for a while," Eugene said. He took her hand, caressing it gently. She squeezed it and smiled at him. He smiled at her in return as they walked back into the lab together.

* * *

><p><strong>Concluding Thoughts:<strong> Thanks for reading this strange, special-interest story! It's been a fun ride.

Please don't expect a sequel to this story. (Cute one-shots about the future within this AU are a different matter, and I have an idea or two, but I make no promises about that. I get a lot of ideas and not all of them turn into stories.) If you want to see more from me, though, don't worry; I'm doing another novella for this fandom. It's another modern AU, a rather different one from the one depicted here, and it's a _doozy_. Less action and adventure, more emotional angst and character-oriented drama. I'm really looking forward to writing it, and I think you'll like it. I hope so, anyway. So, ciao for now, and see ya soon.


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